
Cl Bk. 

Trinity College Library 


Durham, N. C. 








II 









SOME PROBLEMS 
OF PHILOSOPHY 

A BEGINNING OF AN INTRODUCTION 
TO PHILOSOPHY 
BY 

WILLIAM JAMES 



O 


LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. 

FOURTH AVENUE & 30TH STREET, NEW YORK 

LONDON, BOMBAY, AND CALCUTTA 

1921 


COPYRIGHT, igil, BY HENRY JAMES JR. 


ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 


First Edition May, 1911 
Reprinted July, S911 

August, 1916 
September, 1919 
February, 1921 








*. . . he [ Charles Renouvier ] was 
one of the greatest of 'philosophic 
characters, and hut for the decisive 
impression made on me in the 
seventies by his masterly advocacy 
of pluralism, 1 might never have 
got free from the monistic supersti- 
tion under which 1 had grown up. 
The present volume, in short, might 
never have been written. This is 
why, feeling endlessly thankful as 
1 do, I dedicate this text-book to the 
great Renouvier’ s memory.’ [165] 



Digitized by the Internet Archive 
in 2016 


https://archive.org/details/someproblemsofph01jame 


PREFATORY NOTE 


F or several years before his death Professor Wil- 
liam James cherished the purpose of stating his 
views on certain problems of metaphysics in a 
book addressed particularly to readers of phi- 
losophy. He began the actual writing of this 
‘introductory text-book for students in metaphys- 
ics,’ as he once called it, in March, 1909, and to 
complete it was at last his dearest ambition. 
But illness, and other demands on his diminished 
strength, continued to interfere, and what is now 
published is all that he had succeeded in writing 
when he died in August, 1910. 

Two typewritten copies of his unfinished manu- 
script were found. They had been corrected sep- 
arately. A comparison of the independent alter- 
ations in the two copies showed few and slight 
differences of phrase and detail, and indicated no 
formed intention to make substantial changes; yet 
the author perhaps expected to make some further 
alterations in a final revision if he could finish the 
book, for in a memorandum dated July 26, 1910, in 
which he directed the publication of the manu- 
script, he wrote: ‘ Say it is fragmentary and unre- 
vised’ 

This memorandum continues, ‘ Call it “ A begin- 
vii 


PREFATORY NOTE 

ning of an introduction to philosophy.” Say that I 
hoped by it to round out my system, which now is too 
much like an arch built only on one side.’ 

In compliance with the author’s request left in 
the same memorandum, his pupil and friend, Dr. 
H. M. Kallen, has compared the two versions of the 
manuscript and largely prepared the book for the 
press. The divisions and headings in the manu- 
script were incomplete, and for helpful suggestions 
as to these grateful acknowledgments are also due 
to Professor R. B. Perry. 

Henry James, Jr. 

Cambridge, March 25, 1911. 


CONTENTS 


CHAPTER I 

Philosophy and its Critics 3 

Philosophy and those who write it, 3. What philosophy is, 
4. Its value, 6. Its enemies and their objections, 8. Objec- 
tion that it is unpractical answered, 9. This objection in the 
light of history, 10. Philosophy as ‘man thinking,’ 15. Origin 
of man’s present ways of thinking, 16. Science as specialized 
philosophy, 21. Philosophy the residuum of problems unsolved 
by science, 23. Philosophy need not be dogmatic, 25. Not 
divorced from reality, 26. Philosophy as “ metaphysics, ” 27. 

CHAPTER II 

The Problems of Metaphysics 29 

Examples of metaphysical problems, 29. Metaphysics de- 
fined, 31. Nature of metaphysical problems, 32. Rationalism 
and empiricism in metaphysics, 34. 

CHAPTER III 

The Problem of Being 38 

Schopenhauer on the origin of the problem, 38. Various 
treatments of the problem, 40. Rationalist and empiricist 
treatments, 42. Same amount of existence must be begged by 
all, 45. Conservation vs. creation, 45. 

CHAPTER IV 

Percept and Concept — The Import of Concepts . 47 

Their difference, 47. The conceptual order, 50. Concept- 
ual knowledge ; the rationalist view, 55. Conceptual know- 
ledge ; the empiricist view, 57. The content and function of 
concepts, 58. The pragmatic rule, 59. Examples, 62. Ori- 
gin of concepts in their utility, 63. The theoretic use of con- 
cepts, 65. In the a priori sciences, 67. And in physics, 70. 
Concepts bring new values, 71. Summary, 73. 


IX 


CONTENTS 


CHAPTER V 

Percept and Concept — The Abuse of Concepts . 75 

The intellectualist creed, 75. Defects of the conceptual 
translation, 78. The insuperability of sensation, 79. Why con- 
cepts are inadequate, 81. Origin of intelleetualism, 83. Inad- 
equacy of intelleetualism, 84. Examples of puzzles introduced 
by the conceptual translation, 85. Relation of philosophers 
to the dialectic difficulties, 91. The sceptics and Hegel, 92. 
Bradley on percept and concept, 92. Criticism of Bradley, 95. 
Summary, 96. 


CHAPTER VI 

Percept and Concept — Some Corollaries . . . 98 

I. Novelty becomes possible, 98. II. Conceptual systems 
are distinct realms of reality, 101. III. The self-sameness of 
ideal objects, 102. IV. Concepts and percepts are consubstan- 
tial, 107. V. An objection replied to, 109. 

CHAPTER VII 

The One and the Many 113 

Pluralism vs. monism, 113. Kinds of monism, 116. Mys- 
tical monism, 116. Monism of substance, 119. Critique of 
substance, 121. Pragmatic analysis of oneness, 124. Kinds 
of oneness, 126. Unity by concatenation, 129. Unity of pur- 
pose, meaning, 131. Unity of origin, 132. Summary, 132. 

CHAPTER VIII 

The One and the Many (continued) — Values and 

Defects 135 

The monistic theory, 135. The value of absolute oneness, 
136. Its defects, 138. The pluralistic theory, 140. Its de- 
fects, 142. Its advantages, 142. Monism, pluralism and nov- 
elty, 145. 


X 


CONTENTS 


CHAPTER IX 

The Problem of Novelty 147 

Perceptual novelty, 148. Science and novelty, 149. Personal 
experience and novelty, 151. Novelty and the infinite, 153. 

CHAPTER X 

Novelty and the Infinite — The Conceptual 

View 154 

The discontinuity theory, 154. The continuity theory, 155. 
Zeno’s paradoxes, 157. Kant’s antinomies, 160. Ambiguity 
of Kant’s statement of the problem, 162. Renouvier’s solu- 
tion, 164. His solution favors novelty, 164. 

CHAPTER XI 

Novelty and the Infinite — The Perceptual 

View 166 

The standing infinite, 167. Its pragmatic definition, 168. 
The growing infinite, 170. The growing infinite must be 
treated as discontinuous, 172. Objections, 173. (1) The 

number-continuum, 173. (2) The “ new infinite,” 175. 

The new infinite is paradoxical, 176. “ Transfinite numbers,” 

177. Their uses and defects, 178. Russell’s solution of Zeno’s 
paradox by their means, 180. The solution criticized, 181. 
Conclusions, 184. (1) Conceptual transformation of percep- 
tual experience turns the infinite into a problem, 185. (2) It 

leaves the problem of novelty where it was, 187. 

CHAPTER XII 

Novelty and Causation — The Conceptual 

View 189 

The principle of causality, 189. Aristotle on causation, 190. 
Scholasticism on the efficient cause, 191. Occasionalism, 194. 
Leibnitz, 195. Hume, 196. Criticism of Hume, 198. Kant, 


XI 


CONTENTS 


201. Positivism, 203. Deductive theories of causation, 204. 
Summary and conclusion, 205. 

CHAPTER XIII 

Novelty and Causation — The Perceptual 

View 208 

Defects of the perceptual view do not warrant skepticism, 
209. The perpetual experience of causation, 210. In it ‘ final ’ 
and ‘ efficient ’ causation coincide, 212. And novelties arise, 
213. Perceptual causation sets a problem, 215. This is the 
problem of the relation of mind to brain, 217. Conclusion, 
217. 

APPENDIX 

Faith and the Right to Believe .... 221 


INDEX 


233 


SOME PROBLEMS OF 
PHILOSOPHY 



CHAPTER I 


PHILOSOPHY AND ITS CRITICS 

The progress of society is due to the fact that 
individuals vary from the human average in 
all sorts of directions, and that the originality 
is often so attractive or useful that they are 
recognized by their tribe as leaders, and be- 
come objects of envy or admiration, and set- 
ters of new ideals. 

Among the variations, every generation of 
men produces some individuals exceptionally 
Phiioso- preoccupied with theory. Such men 
feose^ho find matter for puzzle and astonish- 
wnte it ment where no one else does. Their 
imagination invents explanations and com- 
bines them. They store up the learning of their 
time, utter prophecies and warnings, and are 
regarded as sages. Philosophy, etymologic- 
ally meaning the love of wisdom, is the work 
of this class of minds, regarded with an indul- 
gent relish, if not with admiration, even by 
those who do not understand them or believe 
much in the truth which they proclaim. 

3 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

Philosophy, thus become a race-heritage, 
forms in its totality a monstrously unwieldy 
mass of learning. So taken, there is no reason 
why any special science like chemistry, or as- 
tronomy, should be excluded from it. By com- 
mon consent, however, special sciences are 
to-day excluded, for reasons presently to be 
explained; and what remains is manageable 
What enough to be taught under the name 

philoso- 
phy is of philosophy by one man if his in- 
terests be broad enough. 

If this were a German textbook I should first 
give my abstract definition of the topic, thus 
limited by usage, then proceed to display its 
‘ Begrijf, und Eintheilung and its ‘Aufgabe 
und Methods.’ But as such displays are usu- 
ally unintelligible to beginners, and unneces- 
sary after reading the book, it will conduce to 
brevity to omit that chapter altogether, useful 
though it might possibly be to more advanced 
readers as a summary of what is to follow. 

I will tarry a moment, however, over the 
matter of definition. Limited by the omission 
of the special sciences, the name of philosophy 

4 


PHILOSOPHY AND ITS CRITICS 


has come more and more to denote ideas of 
universal scope exclusively. The principles of 
explanation that underlie all things without 
exception, the elements common to gods and 
men and animals and stones, the first whence 
and the last whither of the whole cosmic pro- 
cession, the conditions of all knowing, and the 
most general rules of human action — these 
furnish the problems commonly deemed phi- 
losophic par excellence; and the philosopher is 
the man who finds the most to say about them. 
Philosophy is defined in the usual scholastic 
textbooks as ‘the knowledge of things in gen- 
eral by their ultimate causes, so far as natural 
reason can attain to such knowledge.’ This 
means that explanation of the universe at 
large, not description of its details, is what 
philosophy must aim at; and so it happens that 
a view of anything is termed philosophic just 
in proportion as it is broad and connected with 
other views, and as it uses principles not proxi- 
mate, or intermediate, but ultimate and all- 
embracing, to justify itself. Any very sweep- 
ing view of the world is a philosophy in this 

5 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 


sense, even though it may be a vague one. It is 
a Weltanschauung, an intellectualized attitude 
towards life. Professor Dewey well describes 
the constitution of all the philosophies that 
actually exist, when he says that philosophy 
expresses a certain attitude, purpose and tem- 
per of conjoined intellect and will, rather than 
a discipline whose boundaries can be neatly 
marked off . 1 

To know the chief rival attitudes towards 
life, as the history of human thinking has de- 
its value veloped them, and to have heard 
some of the reasons they can give for them- 
selves, ought to be considered an essential 
part of liberal education. Philosophy, indeed, 
in one sense of the term is only a compend- 
ious name for the spirit in education which 
the word ‘college’ stands for in America. 
Things can be taught in dry dogmatic ways 
or in a philosophic way. At a technical school 
a man may grow into a first-rate instrument 
for doing a certain job, but he may miss all 

1 Compare the article * Philosophy ’ in Baldwin’s Dictionary oj 
Philosophy and Psychology. 


6 


PHILOSOPHY AND ITS CRITICS 


the graciousness of mind suggested by the 
term liberal culture. He may remain a cad, 
and not a gentleman, intellectually pinned 
down to his one narrow subject, literal, unable 
to suppose anything different from what he 
has seen, without imagination, atmosphere, or 
mental perspective. 

Philosophy, beginning in wonder, as Plato 
and Aristotle said, is able to fancy everything 
different from what it is. It sees the familiar 
as if it were strange, and the strange as if it 
were familiar. It can take things up and lay 
them down again. Its mind is full of air that 
plays round every subject. It rouses us from 
our native dogmatic slumber and breaks up 
our caked prejudices. Historically it has al- 
ways been a sort of fecundation of four differ- 
ent human interests, science, poetry, religion, 
and logic, by one another. It has sought by 
hard reasoning for results emotionally valu- 
able. To have some contact with it, to catch 
its influence, is thus good for both literary and 
scientific students. By its poetry it appeals to 
literary minds; but its logic stiffens them up 

7 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 


and remedies their softness. By its logic it 
appeals to the scientific; but softens them by 
its other aspects, and saves them from too dry 
a technicality. Both types of student ought 
to get from philosophy a livelier spirit, more 
air, more mental background. ‘Hast any phi- 
losophy in thee, Shepherd?’ — this question 
of Touchstone’s is the one with which men 
should always meet one another. A man with 
no philosophy in him is the most inauspicious 
and unprofitable of all possible social mates. 

I say nothing in all this of what may be 
called the gymnastic use of philosophic study, 
the purely intellectual power gained by defin- 
ing the high and abstract concepts of the phi- 
losopher, and discriminating between them. 

In spite of the advantages thus enumer- 
ated, the study of philosophy has systematic 
Its ene- enemies, and they were never as 
their ob- numerous as at the present day. 1 ne 
jections definite conquests of science and the 
apparent indefiniteness of philosophy’s results 
partly account for this; to say nothing of man’s 
native rudeness of mind, which maliciously 


PHILOSOPHY AND ITS CRITICS 


enjoys deriding long words and abstractions. 
‘Scholastic jargon/ ‘mediaeval dialectics,’ are 
for many people synonyms of the word phi- 
losophy. With his obscure and uncertain spec- 
ulations as to the intimate nature and causes 
of things, the philosopher is likened to a 
‘ blind man in a dark room looking for a black 
hat that is not there.’ His occupation is de- 
scribed as the art of ‘endlessly disputing 
without coming to any conclusion/ or more 
contemptuously still as th e‘ systematische Miss- 
brauch einer eben zu diesem Zwecke erfundenen 
Terminologie.’ 

Only to a very limited degree is this sort of 
hostility reasonable. I will take up some of the 
current objections in successive order, since to 
reply to them will be a convenient way of 
entering into the interior of our subject. 

Objection 1 . Whereas the sciences make 
Objec steady progress and yield applica- 
tion that tions of matchless utility, philosophy 

it is un- 
practical makes no progress and has no practi- 
answered . . . 

cal applications. 

Reply. The opposition is unjustly founded, 
9 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

for the sciences are themselves branches of the 
tree of philosophy. As fast as questions got 
accurately answered, the answers were called 
‘scientific,’ and what men call ‘philosophy’ 
to-day is but the residuum of questions still 
unanswered. At this very moment we are see- 
ing two sciences, psychology and general biol- 
ogy, drop off from the parent trunk and take 
independent root as specialties. The more 
general philosophy cannot as a rule follow the 
voluminous details of any special science. 

A backward glance at the evolution of phi- 
losophy will reward us here. The earliest phi- 
Thisob- losophers in every land were ency- 
the light clopsedic sages, lovers ot wisdom, 
of history sometimes with, and sometimes with- 

out a dominantly ethical or religious interest. 
They were just men curious beyond immedi- 
ate practical needs, and no particular problems, 
but rather the problematic generally, was 
their specialty. China, Persia, Egypt, India, 
had such wise men, but those of Greece are the 
only sages who until very recently have in- 
fluenced the course of western thinking. The 

10 


PHILOSOPHY AND ITS CRITICS 

earlier Greek philosophy lasted, roughly speak- 
ing, for about two hundred and fifty years, 
say from 600 b. c. onwards. Such men as 
Thales, Heracleitus, Pythagoras, Parmenides, 
Anaxagoras, Empedocles, Democritus, were 
mathematicians, theologians, politicians, as- 
tronomers, and physicists. All the learning of 
their time, such as it was, was at their disposal. 
Plato and Aristotle continued their tradition, 
and the great mediaeval philosophers only 
enlarged its field of application. If we turn to 
Saint Thomas Aquinas’s great ‘Summa,’ writ- 
ten in the thirteenth century, we find opinions 
expressed about literally everything, from God 
down to matter, with angels, men, and demons 
taken in on the way. The relations of almost 
everything with everything else, of the cre- 
ator with his creatures, of the knower with 
the known, of substances with forms, of mind 
with body, of sin with salvation, come success- 
ively up for treatment. A theology, a psy- 
chology, a system of duties and morals, are 
given in fullest detail, while physics and logic 
are established in their universal principles. 

11 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 


The impression made on the reader is of al- 
most superhuman intellectual resources. It is 
true that Saint Thomas’s method of handling 
the mass of fact, or supposed fact, which 
he treated, was different from that to which 
we are accustomed. He deduced and proved 
everything, either from fixed principles of 
reason, or from holy Scripture. The properties 
and changes of bodies, for example, were ex- 
plained by the two principles of matter and 
form, as Aristotle had taught. Matter was the 
quantitative, determinable, passive element; 
form, the qualitative, unifying, determining, 
and active principle. All activity was for an 
end. Things could act on each other only when 
in contact. The number of species of things 
was determinate, and their differences dis- 
crete, etc., etc . 1 

By the beginning of the seventeenth century, 
men were tired of the elaborate a priori methods 
of scholasticism. Suarez’s treatises availed not 

1 J. Rickaby’s General Metaphysics (Longmans, Green and Co.) 
gives a popular account of the essentials of St. Thomas’s philosophy of 
nature. Thomas J. Harper’s Metaphysics of the School (Macmillan) 
goes into minute detail. 


12 


PHILOSOPHY AND ITS CRITICS 


to keep them in fashion. But the new phi- 
losophy of Descartes, which displaced the 
scholastic teaching, sweeping over Europe like 
wildfire, preserved the same encyclopaedic 
character. We think of Descartes nowadays 
as the metaphysician who said ‘Cogito, ergo 
sum,’ separated mind from matter as two con- 
trasted substances, and gave a renovated proof 
of God’s existence. But his contemporaries 
thought of him much more as we think of 
Herbert Spencer in our day, as a great cosmic 
evolutionist, who explained, by ‘the redistri- 
bution of matter and motion,’ and the laws of 
impact, the rotations of the heavens, the circu- 
lation of the blood, the refraction of light, ap- 
paratus of vision and of nervous action, the 
passions of the soul, and the connection of the 
mind and body. 

Descartes died in 1650. With Locke’s 
‘Essay Concerning Human Understanding,’ 
published in 1690, philosophy for the first time 
turned more exclusively to the problem of 
knowledge, and became ‘critical.’ This sub- 
jective tendency developed; and although the 

13 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

school of Leibnitz, who was the pattern of a 
universal sage, still kept up the more universal 
tradition — Leibnitz’s follower Wolff published 
systematic treatises on everything, physical 
as well as moral — Hume, who succeeded 
Locke, woke Kant ‘from his dogmatic slum- 
ber,’ and since Kant’s time the word ‘philoso- 
phy’ has come to stand for mental and moral 
speculations far more than for physical the- 
ories. Until a comparatively recent time, 
philosophy was taught in our colleges un- 
der the name of ‘ mental and moral philoso- 
phy,’ or ‘philosophy of the human mind,’ 
exclusively, to distinguish it from ‘natural 
philosophy.’ 

But the older tradition is the better as well 
as the completer one. To know the actual 
peculiarities of the world we are born into is 
surely as important as to know what makes 
worlds anyhow abstractly possible. Yet this 
latter knowledge has been treated by many 
since Kant’s time as the only knowledge worthy 
of being called philosophical. Common men 
feel the question ‘What is Nature like?’ to be 

14 


PHILOSOPHY AND ITS CRITICS 


as meritorious as the Kantian question ‘How 
is Nature possible?’ So philosophy, in order 
not to lose human respect, must take some 
notice of the actual constitution of reality. 
There are signs to-day of a return to the more 
objective tradition . 1 

Philosophy in the full sense is only man 
thinking, thinking about generalities rather 
than about particulars. But whether 

Philoso- 

phy is about generalities or particulars, 

only 

•man man thinks always by the same 
methods. He observes, discriminates, 
generalizes, classifies, looks for causes, traces 
analogies, and makes hypotheses. Philosophy, 
taken as something distinct from science or 
from practical affairs, follows no method 
peculiar to itself. All our thinking to-day has 
evolved gradually out of primitive human 
thought, and the only really important changes 
that have come over its manner (as distin- 
guished from the matters in which it believes) 
are a greater hesitancy in asserting its convic- 


1 For an excellent defence of it I refer my readers to Paulsen’s 
Introduction to Philosophy, translated by Thilly (1895), pp. 19-44. 

15 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

tions, and the habit of seeking verification 1 for 
them whenever it can. 

It will be instructive to trace very briefly the 
origins of our present habits of thought. 

Auguste Comte, the founder of a philosophy 

which he called ‘positive ,’ 2 said that human 

Origin of theory on any subject always took 

man's. three forms in succession. In the 
present 

ways of theological stage of theorizing, phe- 
thinking 

nomena are explained by spirits pro- 
ducing them; in the metaphysical stage, their 
essential feature is made into an abstract idea, 
and this is placed behind them as if it were an 
explanation; in the positive stage, phenomena 
are simply described as to their coexistences 
and successions. Their Taws’ are formulated, 
but no explanation of their natures or existence 
is sought after. Thus a ‘spiritus rector ’ would 
be a theological, — a ‘principle of attraction’ 
a metaphysical, — and a Taw of the squares’ 
would be a positive theory of the planetary 
movements. 


1 Compare G. H. Lewes: Aristotle (1864), chap. 4. 

2 Cours de philosophic positive , 6 volumes, Paris, 1830-1842. 


PHILOSOPHY AND ITS CRITICS 


Comte’s account is too sharp and definite. 
Anthropology shows that the earliest attempts 
at human theorizing mixed the theological and 
metaphysical together. Common things needed 
no special explanation, remarkable things 
alone, odd things, especially deaths, calami- 
ties, diseases, called for it. What made things 
act was the mysterious energy in them, and 
the more awful they were, the more of this 
mana they possessed. The great thing was to 
acquire mana oneself. ‘Sympathetic magic’ 
is the collective name for what seems to have 
been the primitive philosophy here. You could 
act on anything by controlling anything else 
that either was associated with it or resembled 
it. If you wished to injure an enemy, you 
should either make an image of him, or get 
some of his hair or other belongings, or get his 
name written. Injuring the substitute, you 
thus made him suffer correspondingly. If you 
wished the rain to come, you sprinkled the 
ground, if the wind, you whistled, etc. If you 
would have yams grow well in your garden, 
put a stone there that looks like a yam. Would 

17 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

you cure jaundice, give tumeric, that makes 
things look yellow ; or give poppies for troubles 
of the head, because their seed vessels form a 
‘head.’ This ‘doctrine of signatures’ played 
a great part in early medicine. The various 
‘ -mancies ’ and ‘ -mantics ’ come in here, in 
which witchcraft and incipient science are 
indistinguishably mixed. ‘Sympathetic’ the- 
orizing persists to the present day. ‘Thoughts 
are things,’ for a contemporary school — and 
on the whole a good school — of practical 
philosophy. Cultivate the thought of what 
you desire, affirm it, and it will bring all sim- 
ilar thoughts from elsewhere to reinforce it, 
so that finally your wish will be fulfilled . 1 

Little by little, more positive ways of con- 
sidering things began to prevail. Common ele- 
ments in phenomena began to be singled out 
and to form the basis of generalizations. But 
these elements at first had necessarily to be the 

1 Compare Prentice Mulford and others of the ‘ new thought ’ 
type. For primitive sympathetic magic consult J. Jastrow in Fact 
and Fable in Psychology, the chapter on Analogy; F. B. Jevons: In- 
troduction to the History of Religion, chap, iv; J. G. Frazer: The 
Golden Bough, i, 2 ; R. R. Marett : The Threshold of Religion, pas- 
sim. ; A. O. Lovejoy : The Monist, xvi, 357. 

18 


PHILOSOPHY AND ITS CRITICS 


more dramatic or humanly interesting ones. 
The hot, the cold, the wet, the dry in things 
explained their behavior. Some bodies were 
naturally warm, others cold. Motions were 
natural or violent. The heavens moved in 
circles because circular motion was the most 
perfect. The lever was explained by the greater 
quantity of perfection embodied in the move- 
ment of its longer arm . 1 The sun went south 
in winter to escape the cold. Precious or 
beautiful things had exceptional properties. 
Peacock’s flesh resisted putrefaction. The 
lodestone would drop the iron which it held if 
the superiorly powerful diamond was brought 
near, etc. 

Such ideas sound to us grotesque, but im- 
agine no tracks made for us by scientific an- 
cestors, and what aspects would we single out 
from nature to understand things by? Not till 
the beginning of the seventeenth century did 
the more insipid kinds of regularity in things 
abstract men’s attention away from the prop- 

1 On Greek science, see W. Whewell’s History of the Inductive 
Sciences, vol. i, book i; G. H. Lewes, Aristotle, passim. 

19 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 


erties originally picked out. Few of us realize 
how short the career of what we know as 
‘science’ has been. Three hundred and fifty 
years ago hardly any one believed in the Coper- 
nican planetary theory. Optical combinations 
were not discovered. The circulation of the 
blood, the weight of air, the conduction of 
heat, the laws of motion were unknown; the 
common pump was inexplicable ; there were no 
clocks; no thermometers; no general gravita- 
tion; the world was five thousand years old; 
spirits moved the planets; alchemy, magic, 
astrology, imposed on every one’s belief. Mod- 
ern science began only after 1600, with Kep- 
ler, Galileo, Descartes, Torricelli, Pascal, Har- 
vey, Newton, Huygens, and Boyle. Five men 
telling one another in succession the discover- 
ies which their lives had witnessed, could de- 
liver the whole of it into our hands: Harvey 
might have told Newton, who might have told 
Voltaire; Voltaire might have told Dalton, 
who might have told Huxley, who might have 
told the readers of this book. 

The men who began this work of emancipa- 
20 


PHILOSOPHY AND ITS CRITICS 


tion were philosophers in the original sense of 
the word, universal sages. Galileo said that 
Science is he had spent more years on philoso- 
fzed phi phy than months on mathematics, 
losophy Descartes was a universal philoso- 
pher in the fullest sense of the term. But the 
fertility of the newer conceptions made special 
departments of truth grow at such a rate that 
they became too unwieldy with details for the 
more universal minds to carry them, so the 
special sciences of mechanics, astronomy, and 
physics began to drop off from the parent stem. 

No one could have foreseen in advance the 
extraordinary fertility of the more insipid 
mathematical aspects which these geniuses fer- 
reted out. No one could have dreamed of the 
control over nature which the search for their 
concomitant variations would give. ‘Laws ’ de- 
scribe these variations; and all our present laws 
of nature have as their model the proportion- 
ality of v to t, and of s to t 2 which Galileo first 
laid bare. Pascal’s discovery of the proportion- 
ality of altitude to barometric height, New- 
ton’s of acceleration to distance, Boyle’s of 

21 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 


air-volume to pressure, Descartes’ of sine to co- 
sine in the refracted ray, were the first fruits of 
Galileo’s discovery. There was no question of 
agencies, nothing animistic or sympathetic in 
this new way of taking nature. It was descrip- 
tion only, of concomitant variations, after the 
particular quantities that varied had been 
successfully abstracted out. The result soon 
showed itself in a differentiation of human 
knowledge into two spheres, one called ‘Sci- 
ence,’ within which the more definite laws 
apply, the other ‘ General Philosophy,’ in which 
they do not. The state of mind called positi- 
vistic is the result. ‘Down with philosophy!’ 
is the cry of innumerable scientific minds. 
‘Give us measurable facts only, phenomena, 
without the mind’s additions, without entities 
or principles that pretend to explain.’ It is 
largely from this kind of mind that the objec- 
tion that philosophy has made no progress, 
proceeds. 

It is obvious enough that if every step for- 
ward which philosophy makes, every question 
to which an accurate answer is found, gets ac- 

22 


PHILOSOPHY AND ITS CRITICS 


Philoso- 
phy is the 
residuum 
of prob- 
lems un- 
solved by 
science 


credited to science the residuum of unan- 
swered problems will alone remain to consti- 
tute the domain of philosophy, and 
will alone bear her name. In point of 
fact this is just what is happening. 
Philo sophy has becom e a collective 
name for questions that have no t 
yet been answered to the satisfaction of all b y 

does not fol- 


whom they nave Deei 
TowTdSecause some of these questions have 
waited two thousand years for an answer, that 
no answer will ever be forthcoming. Two 
thousand years probably measure but one para- 
graph in that great romance of adventure called 
the history of the intellect of man. The ex- 
traordinary progress of the last three hundred 
years is due to a rather sudden finding of the 
way in which a certain order of questions ought 
to be attacked-, questions admitting of mathe- 
matical treatment. But to assume therefore, 
that the only possible philosophy must be 
mechanical and mathematical, and to dispar- 
age all enquiry into the other sorts of question, 
is to forget the extreme diversity of aspects 

23 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 


under which reality undoubtedly exists. To 
the spiritual questions the proper avenues of 
philosophic approach will also undoubtedly be 
found. They have, to some extent, been found 
already. In some respects, indeed, ‘science’ 
has made less progress than ‘ philosophy ’ — 
its most general conceptions would astonish 
neither Aristotle nor Descartes, could they 
revisit our earth. The composition of things 
from elements, their evolution, the conserva- 
tion of energy, the idea of a universal deter- 
minism, would seem to them commonplace 
enough — the little things, the microscopes, 
electric lights, telephones, and details of the 
sciences, would be to them the awe-inspiring 
things. But if they opened our books on meta- 
physics, or visited a philosophic lecture room, 
everything would sound strange. The whole 
idealistic or ‘critical’ attitude of our time 
would be novel, and it would be long before 
they took it in. 1 . 

Objection 2. Philosophy is dogmatic, and 

1 The reader will find all that I have said, and much more, set forth 
in an excellent article by James Ward in Mind, vol. 15, no. lviii: ‘The 
Progress of Philosophy.’ 


24 


PHILOSOPHY AND ITS CRITICS 


pretends to settle things by pure reason, 
whereas the only fruitful mode of getting at 
truth is to appeal to concrete experience. Sci- 
ence collects, classes, and analyzes facts, and 
thereby far outstrips philosophy. 

Reply. This objection is historically valid. 
Too many philosophers have aimed at closed 
Philo so- systems, established a priori, claim- 

notbe ing infallibility, and to be accepted 
dogmatic or re j ec t ec } on ly as totals. The sci- 
ences on the other hand, using hypotheses only, 
but always seeking to verify them by experi- 
ment and observation, open a w.ay for indefi- 
nite self-correction and increase. At the pres- 
ent day, it is getting more and more difficult 
for dogmatists claiming finality for their sys- 
tems, to get a hearing in educated circles. 
Hypothesis and verification, the watchwords 
of science, have set the fashion too strongly in 
academic minds. 

Since philosophers are only men thinking 
about things in the most comprehensive pos- 
sible way, they can use any method whatsoever 
freely.- Philosophy must, in any case, com- 

25 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 


plete the sciences, and must incorporate their 
methods. One cannot see why, if such a policy 
should appear advisable, philosophy might 
not end by forswearing all dogmatism what- 
ever, and become as hypothetical in her man- 
ners as the most empirical science of them all. 

Objection 3. Philosophy is out of touch with 
real life, for which it substitutes abstractions. 
The real world is various, tangled, painful. 
Philosophers have, almost without exception, 
treated it as noble, simple, and perfect, ignoring 
the complexity of fact, and indulging in a sort 
of optimism that exposes their systems to the 
contempt of common men, and to the satire 
of such writers as Voltaire and Schopenhauer. 
The great popular success of Schopenhauer is 
due to the fact that, first among philosophers, 
he spoke the concrete truth about the ills of life. 

Reply. This objection also is historically 

valid, but no reason appears why philosophy 

Nor is it should keep aloof from reality per- 
divorced , . T t , 

{rom manently. Her manners may change 
reaUty as she successfully develops. The 
thin and noble abstractions may give way to 

26 


PHILOSOPHY AND ITS CRITICS 


more solid and real constructions, when the 
materials and methods for making such con- 
structions shall be more and more securely 
ascertained. In the end philosophers may get 
into as close contact as realistic novelists with 
the facts of life. 

In conclusion. In its original acceptation, 
meaning the completest knowledge of the uni- 
Phiioso- verse, philosophy must include the 
meta- S results of all the sciences, and cannot 
physics k e contrasted with the latter. It 
simply aims at making of science what Herbert 
Spencer calls a ‘system of completely unified 
knowledge .’ 1 In the more modern sense, of 
something contrasted with the sciences, phi- 
losophy means ‘metaphysics.’ The older sense 
is the more worthy sense, and as the results of 
the sciences get more available for co-ordina- 
tion, and the conditions for finding truth in 
different kinds of question get more methodic- 
ally defined, we may hope that the term will 
revert to its original meaning. Science, meta- 

1 See the excellent chapter in Spencer’s First Principles, entitled: 
‘ Philosophy Defined.’ 


27 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 


physics, and religion may then again form a 
single body of wisdom, and lend each other 
mutual support. 

At present this hope is far from its fulfil- 
ment. I propose in this book to take philoso- 
phy in the narrow sense of metaphysics, and 
to let both religion and the results of the sci- 
ences alone. 



CHAPTER II 


THE PROBLEMS OF METAPHYSICS 

No exact definition of the term ‘metaphys- 
ics ’ is possible, and to name some of the prob- 
Exampies Iems it treats of is the best way of 
physical" getting at the meaning of the word, 
problems me ans the discussion of various 
obscure, abstract, and universal questions 
which the sciences and life in general suggest 
but do not solve; questions left over, as it were; 
questions, all of them very broad and deep, and 
relating to the whole of things, or to the ulti- 
mate elements thereof. Instead of a definition 
let me cite a few examples, in a random order, 
of such questions : — 

xj What are ‘thoughts/ and what are ‘things’? 
and how are they connected? 

What do we mean when we say ‘truth’? 

Is there a common stuff out of which all 
facts are made? 

How comes there to be a world at all? and, 
Might it as well not have been? 

29 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 


Which is the most real kind of reality? 
•'What binds all things into one universe? 

Is unity or diversity more fundamental? 
/Have all things one origin? or many? 

Is everything predestined, or are some things 
(our wills for example) free? 

Is the world infinite or finite in amount? 
Are its parts continuous, or are there vacua? 
What is God? — or the gods? 
i How are mind and body joined? Do they 
act on each other? 

How does anything act on anything else? 
How can one thing change or grow out of 
another thing? 

Are space and time beings? — or what? 

In knowledge, how does the object get into 
the mind? — or the mind get at the object? 

We know by means of universal notions. 
Are these also real? Or are only particular 
things real? 

What is meant by a ‘thing’? 

‘ Principles of reason,’ — are they inborn 
or derived? 

si Are ‘ beauty’ and ‘good’ matters of opinion 

30 


THE PROBLEMS OF METAPHYSICS 


only? Or have they objective validity? And, 
if so, what does the phrase mean? 

Such are specimens of the kind of question 
termed metaphysical. Kant said that the three 
essential metaphysical questions were: — 

What can I know? 

What should I do? 

What may I hope? 

A glance at all such questions suffices to rule 
out such a definition of metaphysics as that of 
Meta- Christian Wolff, who called it ‘the 

physics 

defined science of what is possible,’ as dis- 
tinguished from that of what is actual, for most 
of the questions relate to what is actual fact. One X " 
may say that metaphysics inquires into the 
cause, the substance, the meaning, and the out- 
come of all things. Or one may call it the sci- 
ence of the most universal principles of reality 
(whether experienced by us or not), in their 
connection with one another and with our pow- 
ers of knowledge. ‘ Principles ’ here may mean / 
either entities, like ‘atoms,’ ‘souls,’ or logical 
laws like : ‘ A thing must either exist or not exist ’ ; 
or generalized facts, like ‘things can act only 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 


after they exist.’ But the principles are so num- 
erous, and the ‘ science ’ of them is so far from 
completion, that such definitions have only a 
decorative value. The serious work of meta- 
physics is done over the separate single ques- 
tions. If these should get cleared up, talk of met- 
aphysics as a unified science might properly be- 
gin. This book proposes to handle only a few 
separate problems, leaving others untouched. 

These problems are for the most part real; 
that is, but few of them result from a misuse 
Nature of of terms in stating them. ‘Things,’ 

physical i° r exam pl e > are or are n °t composed 
problems G f one stuff ; they either have or have 

not a single origin; they either are or are not 
completely predetermined, etc. Such alterna- 
tives may indeed be impossible of decision; 
but until this is conclusively proved of them, 
they confront us legitimately, and some one 
must take charge of them and keep account of 
the solutions that are proposed, even if he does 
not himself add new ones. The opinions of the 
learned regarding them must, in short, be 
classified and responsibly discussed. For in- 

32 


THE PROBLEMS OF METAPHYSICS 


stance, how many opinions are possible as to 
the origin of the world? Spencer says that the 
world must have been either eternal, or self- 
created, or created by an outside power. So 
for him there are only three. Is this correct? 
If so, which of the three views seems the most 
reasonable? and why? In a moment we are in 
the thick of metaphysics. We have to be meta- 
physicians even to decide with Spencer that 
neither mode of origin is thinkable and that 
the whole problem is unreal. 

Some hypotheses may be absurd on their 
face, because they are self-contradictory. If, 
for example, infinity means ‘what can never 
be completed by successive syntheses,’ the 
notion of anything made by the successive 
addition of infinitely numerous parts, and yet 
completed, is absurd. Other hypotheses, for 
example that everything in nature contributes 
to a single supreme purpose, may be insuscep- 
tible either of proof or of disproof. Other 
hypotheses again, for instance that vacua 
exist, may be susceptible of probable solution. 
The classing of the hypotheses is thus as neces- 

33 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

sary as the classing of the problems, and both 
must be recognized as constituting a serious 
branch of learning . 1 There must in short be 
metaphysicians. Let us for a while become 
metaphysicians ourselves. 

As we survey the history of metaphysics we 
soon realize that two pretty distinct types of 
Rational- mind have filled it with their war- 


physics saying of Coleridge’s is often quoted, 
to the effect that every one is born either a 
platonist or an aristotelian. By aristotelian, he 
means empiricist, and by platonist, he means 
rationalist; but although the contrast between 
the two Greek philosphers exists in the sense 
in which Coleridge meant it, both of them 
were rationalists as compared with the kind of 
empiricism which Democritus and Protagoras 
developed; and Coleridge had better have 
taken either of those names instead of Aris- 
totle as his empiricist example. 

1 Consult here Paul Janet: Principes de Metaphysique, etc., 1897, 
legons 1, 2. 


ism and 
empiri- 
cism in 
meta- 


fare. Let us call them the rationalist 
and the empiricist types of mind. A 


34 


THE PROBLEMS OF METAPHYSICS 


Rationalists are the men of principles, empiri- 
cists the men of facts; but, since principles are 
universals, and facts are particulars, perhaps 
the best way of characterizing the two ten- 
dencies is to say that rationalist thinking pro- 
ceeds most willingly by going from wholes to 
parts, while empiricist thinking proceeds by 
going from parts to wholes. Plato, the arch- 
rationalist, explained the details of nature by 
their participation in ‘ideas,’ which all de- 
pended on the supreme idea of the ‘good.’ 
Protagoras and Democritus w T ere empiricists. 
The latter explained the whole cosmos, includ- 
ing gods as well as men, and thoughts as well 
as things, by their composition out of atomic 
elements; Protagoras explained truth, which 
for Plato was the absolute system of the ideas, 
as a collective name for men’s opinions. 

Rationalists prefer to deduce facts from 
principles. Empiricists prefer to explain prin- 
ciples as inductions from facts. Is thought for 
the sake of life? oris life for the sake of thought? 
Empiricism inclines to the former, rationalism 
to the latter branch of the alternative. God’s 

35 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 


life, according to Aristotle and Hegel, is pure 
theory. The mood of admiration is natural to 
rationalism. Its theories are usually optimis- 
tic, supplementing the experienced world by 
clean and pure ideal constructions. Aristotle 
and Plato, the Scholastics, Descartes, Spinoza, 
Leibnitz, Kant, and Hegel are examples of 
This. They claimed absolute finality for their 
systems, in the noble architecture of which, as 
their authors believed, truth was eternally 
embalmed. This temper of finality is foreign 
to empiricist minds. They may be dogmatic 
about their method of building on ‘hard facts,’ 
but they are willing to be sceptical about any 
conclusions reached by the method at a given 
time. They aim at accuracy of detail rather 
than at completeness; are contented to be 
fragmentary; are less inspiring than the ra- 
tionalists, often treating the high as a case of 
‘nothing but’ the low (‘nothing but’ self-in- 
terest well understood, etc.), but they usually 
keep more in touch with actual life, are less 
subjective, and their spirit is obviously more 
‘scientific’ in the hackneyed sense of that 

36 


THE PROBLEMS OF METAPHYSICS 


term. Socrates, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, the 
Mills, F. A. Lange, J. Dewey, F. C. S. Schiller, 
Bergson, and other contemporaries are speci- 
mens of this type. Of course we find mixed 
minds in abundance, and few philosophers are 
typical in either class. Kant may fairly be 
called mixed. Lotze and Royce are mixed. 
The author of this volume is weakly endowed 
on the rationalist side, and his book will show 
a strong leaning towards empiricism. The 
clash of the two ways of looking at things will 
be emphasized throughout the volume . 1 

I will now enter the interior of the subject 
by discussing special problems as examples of 
metaphysical inquiry; and in order not to con- 
ceal any of the skeletons in the philosophic 
closet, I will start with the worst problem 
possible, the so-called ‘ontological problem,’ 
or question of how there comes to be anything 
at all. 

1 Compare W. James: ‘The Sentiment of Rationality,’ in The Will 
to Believe (Longmans, Green and Co., 1899), p. 63 f.; Pragmatism, 
(ibid.), chap, i; A Pluralistic Universe (ibid.), chap. i. 


CHAPTER III 


THE PROBLEM OF BEING 

How comes the world to be here at all instead 
of the nonentity which might be imagined in 
its place? Schopenhauer’s remarks on this 
question may be considered classical. ‘Apart 
from man,’ he says, ‘no being wonders at its 
own existence. When man first becomes con- 
scious, he takes himself for granted, as some- 
thing needing no explanation. But not for 
long; for, with the rise of the first reflection, 
Schopen- that won der begins which is the 

haueron mother of metaphysics, and which 
the origin 

of the made Aristotle say that men now 
and always seek to philosophize 
because of wonder — The lower a man stands 
in intellectual respects the less of a riddle does 
existence seem to him . . . but, the clearer his 
consciousness becomes the more the problem 
grasps him in its greatness. In fact the unrest 
which keeps the never stopping clock of meta- 
physics going is the thought that the non-ex- 
istence of this world is just as possible as its 

38 


THE PROBLEM OF BEING 


existence. Nay more, we soon conceive the 
world as something the non-existence of which 
not only is conceivable but would indeed be 
preferable to its existence; so that our wonder 
passes easily into a brooding over that fatality 
which nevertheless could call such a world into 
being, and mislead the immense force that 
could produce and preserve it into an activity 
so hostile to its own interests. The philosophic 
wonder thus becomes a sad astonishment, and 
like the overture to Don Giovanni, philosophy 
begins with a minor chord .’ 1 

One need only shut oneself in a closet and 
begin to think of the fact of one’s being there, 
of one’s queer bodily shape in the darkness (a 
thing to make children scream at, as Steven- 
son says), of one’s fantastic character and all, 
to have the wonder steal over the detail as 
much as over the general fact of being, and to 
see that it is only familiarity that blunts it. 
Not only that anything should be, but that this 
very thing should be, is mysterious! Philoso- 

1 The World as Will and Representation: Appendix 17, ‘On the 
metaphysical need of man,’ abridged. 

39 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

phy stares, but brings no reasoned solution, 
for from nothing to being there is no logical 
bridge. 

Attempts are sometimes made to banish the 
question rather than to give it an answer. 
Those who ask it, we are told, extend illegit- 
imately to the whole of being the contrast 

Various to a supposed alternative non-being 
treatments ■, . , , , . , , . 

of the which only particular beings possess, 
problem These, indeed, were not, and now 
are. But being in general, or in some shape, 
always was, and you cannot rightly bring the 
whole of it into relation with a primordial non- 
entity. Whether as God or as material atoms, 
it is itself primal and eternal. But if you call 
any being whatever eternal, some philosophers 
have always been ready to taunt you with the 
paradox inherent in the assumption. Is past 
eternity completed? they ask: If so, they go on, 
it must have had a beginning ; for whether 
your imagination traverses it forwards or back- 
wards, it offers an identical content or stuff to 
be measured; and if the amount comes to an 
end in one way, it ought to come to an end in 

40 


THE PROBLEM OF BEING 


the other. In other words, since we now witness 
its end, some past moment must have wit- 
nessed its beginning. If, however, it had a be- 
ginning, when was that, and why? 

You are up against the previous nothing, and 
do not see how it ever passed into being. This 
dilemma, of having to choose between a regress 
which, although called infinite, has neverthe- 
less come to a termination, and an absolute 
first, has played a great part in philosophy’s 
history. 

Other attempts still are made at exorcising 
the question. Non-being is not, said Parmen- 
ides and Zeno; only being is. Hence what is, is 
necessarily being — being, in short, is neces- 
sary. Others, calling the idea of nonentity 
no real idea, have said that on the absence 
of an idea can no genuine problem be founded. 
More curtly still, the whole ontological wonder 
has been called diseased, a case of Grubelsucht 
like asking, ‘Why am I myself? ’ or 4 Why is a 
triangle a triangle?’ 

Rationalistic minds here and there have 
sought to reduce the mystery. Some forms of 

41 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

being have been deemed more natural, so to 

say, or more inevitable and necessary than 

Rational- others. Empiricists of the evolution- 
ist and 

empiricist ar y type — Herbert Spencer seems 
treatments a good example — have assumed 

that whatever had the least of reality, was 
weakest, faintest, most imperceptible, most 
nascent, might come easiest first, and be the 
earliest successor to nonentity. Little by little 
the fuller grades of being might have added 
themselves in the same gradual way until the 
whole universe grew up. 

To others not the minimum, but the maxi- 
mum of being has seemed the earliest First for 
the intellect to accept. ‘The perfection of a 
thing does not keep it from existing,’ Spinoza 
said, ‘on the contrary, it founds its existence.’ 1 
It is mere prejudice to assume that it is harder 
for the great than for the little to be, and that 
easiest of all it is to be nothing. What makes 
things difficult in any line is the alien obstruc- 
tions that are met with, and the smaller and 
weaker the thing the more powerful over it 


Ethics, part i, prop, xi, scholium. 

42 


THE PROBLEM OF BEING 


these become. Some things are so great and 
inclusive that to be is implied in their very na- 
ture. The anselmian or ontological proof of 
God’s existence, sometimes called the cartesian 
proof, criticised by Saint Thomas, rejected by 
Kant, re-defended by Hegel, follows this line of 
thought. What is conceived as imperfect may 
lack being among its other lacks, but if God, 
who is expressly defined as Ens perfectissi- 
mum, lacked anything whatever, he would 
contradict his own definition. He cannot lack 
being therefore: He is Ens necessarium, Ens 
realissimum, as well as Ens perfectissimum. 1 

Hegel in his lordly way says: ‘It would be 
strange if God were not rich enough to embrace 
so poor a category as Being, the poorest and 
most abstract of all.’ This is somewhat in line 
with Kant’s saying that a real dollar does not 
contain one cent more than an imaginary dol- 
lar. At the beginning of his logic Hegel seeks in 
another way to mediate nonentity with being. 

1 St. Anselm: Proslogium, etc. Translated by Doane: Chicago, 
1903; Descartes: Meditations , p. 5; Kant: Critique of Pure Reason, 
Transcendental Dialectic, ‘On the impossibility of an ontological 
proof, etc.’ 


43 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

Since ‘ being ’ in the abstract, mere being, means 
nothing in particular, it is indistinguishable 
from ‘nothing’; and he seems dimly to think 
that this constitutes an identity between the 
two notions, of which some use may be made 
in getting from one to the other. Other still 
queerer attempts show well the rationalist 
temper. Mathematically you can deduce 1 
from 0 by the following process: ^=jEi= 1. 

Or physically if all being has (as it seems to 
have) a ‘polar’ construction, so that every 
positive part of it has its negative, we get the 
simple equation: +1—1 = 0, plus and minus 
being the signs of polarity in physics. 

It is not probable that the reader will be 
satisfied with any of these solutions, and con- 
temporary philosophers, even rationalistically 
minded ones, have on the whole agreed that no 
one has intelligibly banished the mystery of 
fact. Whether the original nothing burst into 
God and vanished, as night vanishes in day, 
while God thereupon became the creative 
principle of all lesser beings; or whether all 
things have foisted or shaped themselves im- 

44 


THE PROBLEM OF BEING 


The same 
amount of 
existence 
must be 
begged by 
all 


perceptibly into existence, the same amount 
of existence has in the end to be assumed 
and begged by the philosopher. To 
comminute the difficulty is not to 
quench it. If you are a rationalist 
you beg a kilogram of being at once, 
we will say; if you are an empiricist you beg a 
thousand successive grams; but you beg the 
same amount in each case, and you are the 
same beggar whatever you may pretend. You 
leave the logical riddle untouched, of how the 
coming of whatever is, came it all at once, or 
came it piecemeal, can be intellectually under- 
stood . 1 

If being gradually grew, its quantity was of 

course not always the same, and may not be 

Conser- th e same hereafter. To most phi- 
vation vs. 

creation losophers this view has seemed ab- 
surd, neither God, nor primordial matter, nor 
energy being supposed to admit of increase or 
decrease. The orthodox opinion is that the 


1 In more technical language, one may say that fact or being is 
‘contingent,’ or matter of ‘chance,’ so far as our intellect is concerned. 
The conditions of its appearance are uncertain, unforeseeable, when 
future, and when past, elusive. 


45 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 


quantity of reality must at all costs be con- 
served, and the waxing and waning of our 
phenomenal experiences must be treated as 
surface appearances which leave the deeps un- 
touched. 

Nevertheless, within experience, phenomena 
come and go. There are novelties; there are 
losses. The world seems, on the concrete and 
proximate level at least, really to grow. So the 
question recurs : How do our finite experiences 
come into being from moment to moment? 
By inertia? By perpetual creation? Do the 
new ones come at the call of the old ones? Why 
do not they all go out like a candle? 

Who can tell off-hand? The question of be- 
ing is the darkest in all philosophy. All of us 
are beggars here, and no school can speak dis- 
dainfully of another or give itself superior airs. 
For all of us alike, Fact forms a datum, gift, or 
V or gefundenes, which we cannot burrow under, 
explain or get behind. It makes itself some- 
how, and our business is far more with its 
What than with its Whence or Why. 


CHAPTER IV 


PERCEPT AND CONCEPT-THE IMPORT 
OF CONCEPTS 

The problem convenient to take up next in 
order will be that of the d ifference_ between 
t houg jd^and things. ‘ Things ’ are known to us 
by our senses, and are called ‘presentations’ 
by some authors, to distinguish them from the 
ideas or ‘ representations ’ which we may have 
when our senses are closed. I myself have 
grown accustomed to the words ‘percept’ and 
‘ concept ’ in treating of the contrast, but con- 
cepts flow out of percepts and into them again, 
Their they are so interlaced, and our life 
difference res t s on them so interchangeably and 
undiscriminatingly, that it is often difficult to 
impart quickly to beginners a clear notion of 
the difference meant. Sensation and thought 
in man are mingled, but they vary independ- 
ently. In our quadrupedal relatives thought 
proper is at a minimum, but we have no reason 
to suppose that their immediate life of feeling 
is either less or more copious than ours. Feel- 

47 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 


mg must have been originally self-sufficing; 
and thought appears as a superadded function, 
adapting us to a wider environment than that 
of which brutes take account. Some parts of the 
stream of feeling must be more intense, em- 
phatic, and exciting than others in animals as 
well as in ourselves; but whereas lower animals 
simply react upon these more salient sensa- 
tions by appropriate movements, higher ani- 
mals remember them, and men react on them 
intellectually, by using nouns, adjectives, and 
verbs to identify them when they meet them 
elsewhere. 

The great difference between percepts and 
concepts 1 is that percepts are continuous and 
concepts are discrete. Not discrete in their 
being, for conception as an act is part of the 
flux of feeling, but discrete from each other in 
their several meanings. Each concept means 

1 In what follows I shall freely use synonyms for these two terms. 
‘Idea,’ ‘thought,’ and ‘intellection’ are synonymous with ‘concept.’ 
Instead of ‘ percept ’ I shall often speak of ‘ sensation,’ ‘ feeling,’ ‘ intui- 
tion,’ and sometimes of ‘ sensible experience ’ or of the ‘ immediate 
flow ’ of conscious life. Since Hegel’s time what is simply perceived 
has been called the ‘immediate,’ while the ‘mediated ’ is synonymous 
with what is conceived. 


48 


PERCEPT AND CONCEPT 


just what it singly means, and nothing else; 
and if the conceiver does not know whether he 
means this or means that, it shows that his 
concept is imperfectly formed. The perceptual 
flux as such, on the contrary, means nothing, 
and is but what it immediately is. No matter 
how small a tract of it be taken, it is always a 
much-at-once, and contains innumerable as- 
pects and characters which conception can 
pick out, isolate, and thereafter always intend. 
It shows duration, intensity, complexity or 
simplicity, interestingness, excitingness, pleas- 
antness or their opposites. Data from all our 
senses enter into it, merged in a general ex- 
tensiveness of which each occupies a big or 
little share. Yet all these parts leave its unity 
unbroken. Its boundaries are no more distinct 
than are those of the field of vision. Boundaries 
are things that intervene; but here nothing 
intervenes save parts of the perceptual flux 
itself, and these are overflowed by what they 
separate, so that whatever we distinguish and 
isolate conceptually is found perceptually to 
telescope and compenetrate and diffuse into 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 


its neighbors. The cuts we make are purely 
ideal. If my reader can succeed in abstracting 
from all conceptual interpretation and lapse 
back into his immediate sensible life at this 
very moment, he will find it to be what some- 
one has called a big blooming buzzing confu- 
sion, as free from contradiction in its ‘much- 
at-onceness’ as it is all alive and evidently 
there . 1 

Out of this aboriginal sensible muchness 

attention carves out objects, which conception 

The con- then names and identifies forever — 
ceptual 

order in the sky ‘constellations,’ on the 
earth ‘beach,’ ‘sea,’ ‘cliff,’ ‘bushes,’ ‘grass.’ 
Out of time we cut ‘days’ and ‘nights,’ ‘sum- 
mers’ and ‘winters.’ We say what each part 
of the sensible continuum is, and all these ab- 
stracted whats are concepts . 2 

1 Compare W. James: A Pluralistic Universe, pp. 282-288. Also 
Psychology , Briefer Course, pp. 157-166. 

2 On the function of conception consult: Sir William Hamilton’s 
Lectures on Logic, 9, 10; H. L. Mansel, Prolegomena Logica, chap, i; 
A. Schopenhauer, The World as Will, etc., Supplements 6, 7 to book ii; 
W. James, Principles of Psychology, chap, xii; Briefer Course, chap. xiv. 
Also J.G. Romanes: Mental Evolution in Man, chaps, iii, iv; Th. Ribot: 
l' Evolution des Idies Generates, chap, vi; Th. Ruyssen, Essai sur V Evolu- 
tion psychologique duJugement, chap, vii; Laromigui&re, Leqons de Phil- 

50 


PERCEPT AND CONCEPT 


The intellectual life of man consists almost 
wholly in his substitution of a conceptual order 
for the perceptual order in which his experience 
originally comes. But before tracing the conse- 
quences of the substitution, I must say some- 
thing about the conceptual order itself . 1 

Trains of concepts unmixed with percepts 
grow frequent in the adult mind; and parts of 
these conceptual trains arrest our attention 
just as parts of the perceptual flow did, giving 
rise to concepts of a higher order of abstract- 
ness. So subtile is the discernment of man, and 
so great the power of some men to single out 

osophie, part 2, lesson 12. The account I give directly contradicts that 
which Kant gave which has prevailed since Kant’s time. Kant 
always speaks of the aboriginal sensible flux as a ‘ manifold ’ of which 
he considers the essential character to be its disconnectedness. To get 
any togetherness at all into it requires, he thinks, the agency of the 
‘transcendental ego of apperception,’ and to get any definite connec- 
tions requires the agency of the understanding, with its synthetizing 
concepts or ‘categories.’ ‘Die Verbindung (conjunctio) eines Man- 
nigfaltigen kann iiberhaupt niemals durch Sinne in uns kommen, und 
kann also auch nicht in der reinen Form der sinnlichen Anschauung 
zugleich mit enthalten sein; denn sie ist ein Actus der Spontaneitat 
der Einbildungskraft, und, da man diese, zum Unterschiede von der 
Sinnlichkeit, Verstand nennen muss, so ist alle Verbindung . . . eine 
Verstandeshandlung.’ K. d. r. V., 2te, Aufg., pp. 129-130. The reader 
must decide which account agrees best with his own actual experience. 

1 The substitution was first described in these terms by S. H. Hodg* 
son in his Philosophy of Reflection, i, 288-310. 

51 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

the most fugitive elements of what passes 
before them, that these new formations have 
no limit. Aspect within aspect, quality after 
quality, relation upon relation, absences and 
negations as well as present features, end by 
being noted and their names added to the store 
of nouns, verbs, adjectives, conjunctions, and 
prepositions by which the human mind inter- 
prets life. Every new book verbalizes some 
new concept, which becomes important in pro- 
portion to the use that can be made of it. Dif- 
ferent universes of thought thus arise, with 
specific sorts of relation among their ingredi- 
ents. The world of common-sense ‘things’; the 
w r orld of material tasks to be done; the mathe- 
matical world of pure forms; the world of 
ethical propositions; the worlds of logic, of 
music, etc., all abstracted and generalized from 
long forgotten perceptual instances, from which 
they have as it were flowered out, return and 
merge themselves again in the particulars of 
our present and future perception. By those 
whats we apperceive all our thises. Percepts 
and concepts interpenetrate and melt together, 

52 


PERCEPT AND CONCEPT 


impregnate and fertilize each other. Neither, 
taken alone, knows reality in its completeness. 
We need them both, as we need both our legs 
to walk with. 

From Aristotle downwards philosophers 
have frankly admitted the indispensability, for 
complete knowledge of fact, of both the sensa- 
tional and the intellectual contribution . 1 For 
complete knowledge of fact, I say; but facts 
are particulars and connect themselves with 
practical necessities and the arts; and Greek 
philosophers soon formed the notion that a 
knowledge of so-called ‘universals,’ consisting 
of concepts of abstract forms, qualities, num- 
bers, and relations was the only knowledge 
worthy of the truly philosophic mind. Particu- 
lar facts decay and our perceptions of them 
vary. A concept never varies; and between 
such unvarying terms the relations must be 
constant and express eternal verities. Hence 
there arose a tendency, which has lasted all 
through philosophy, to contrast the know- 

1 See, for example, book i, chap, ii, of Aristotle’s Metaphysics. 


53 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 


ledge of universals and intelligibles, as god- 
like, dignified, and honorable to the knower, 
with that of particulars and sensibles as some- 
thing relatively base which more allies us with 
the beasts . 1 

1 Plato in numerous places, but chiefly in books 6 and 7 of the Re- 
public, contrasts perceptual knowledge as ‘opinion' with real know- 
ledge, to the latter’s glory. For an excellent historic sketch of this 
platonistic view see the first part of E. Laas’s Idealismus und Positivis- 
mus, 1879. For expressions of the ultra-intellectualistic view, read the 
passage from Plotinus on the Intellect in C. M. Bakewell’s Source-book 
in Ancient Philosophy, N. Y. 1907, pp. 353 f.; Bossuet, Traite de la 
Connaissance de Dieu, chap, iv, §§ v, vi; R. Cudworth, A Treatise con- 
cerning eternal amd immutable Morality, books iii, iv. - — ‘Plato,’ writes 
Prof. Santayana, ‘ thought that all the truth and meaning of earthly 
things was the reference they contained to a heavenly original. This 
heavenly original we remember to recognize even among the distor- 
tions, disappearances, and multiplications of its ephemeral copies. . . . 
The impressions themselves have no permanence, no intelligible es- 
sence, but are always either arising or ceasing to be. There must be, 
he tells us, an eternal and clearly definable object of which the visible 
appearances to us are the multiform semblance; now by one trait, 
now by another, the phantom before us reminds us of that half- 
forgotten celestial reality and makes us utter its name. . . . We and 
the whole universe exist only in the attempt to return to our perfec- 
tion, to lose ourselves again in God. That ineffable good is our natu- 
ral possession; and all we honor in this life is but a partial recovery 
of our birthright; every delightful thing is like a rift in the clouds, 
through which we catch a glimpse of our native heaven. And if that 
heaven seems so far away, and the idea of it so dim and unreal, it is 
because we are so far from perfect, so immersed in what is alien and 
destructive to the soul.’ (‘Platonic Love in some Italian Poets,’ in 
Interpretations of Poetry and Religion, 1896.) 

This is the interpretation of Plato which has been current since 

54 


PERCEPT AND CONCEPT 


For rationalistic writers conceptual know- 
ledge was not only the more noble knowledge, 
Concept but it originated independently of ’ 

uai know- a H perceptual particulars. Such con- 
ledge— the 

rational- cepts as God, perfection, eternity, in- 
ist view • • • • « • 

finity, immutability, identity, abso- 
lute beauty, truth, justice, necessity, freedom, 
duty, worth, etc., and the part they play in 
our mind, are, it was supposed, impossible to 
explain as results of practical experience. The 
empiricist view, and probably the true view, is 
that they do result from practical experience . 1 
But a more important question than that as to 
the origin of our concepts is that as to their 


Aristotle. It should be said that its profundity has been challenged by 
Prof. A. J. Stewart. (Plato’s Doctrine of Ideas, Oxford, 1909.) 

Aristotle found great fault with Plato’s treatment of ideas as heav- 
enly originals, but he agreed with him fully as to the superior excel- 
lence of the conceptual or theoretic life. In chapters vii and viii of book 
x of the Nicomachean Ethics he extols contemplation of universal rela- 
tions as alone yielding pure happiness. ‘ The life of God, in all its ex- 
ceeding blessedness, will consist in the exercise of philosophic thought; 
and of all human activities, that will be the happiest which is most 
akin to the divine.’ 

1 John Locke, in his Essay concerning Human Understanding, books 
i, ii, was the great popularizer of this doctrine. Condillac’s TraitS 
des Sensations, Helvetius’s work, De VHomme, and James Mill’s 
Analysis of the Human Mind, were more radical successors of Locke’s 
great book. 


55 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

functional use and value; — is that tied down 
to perceptual experience, or out of all relation 
to it? Is conceptual knowledge self-sufficing 
and a revelation all by itself, quite apart from 
its uses in helping to a better understanding 
of the world of sense? 

Rationalists say, Yes. For, as we shall see 
in later places (page 68), the various conceptual 
universes referred to on page 52 can be con- 
sidered in complete abstraction from percept- 
ual reality, and when they are so considered, 
all sorts of fixed relations can be discovered 
among their parts. From these the a 'priori 
sciences of logic, mathematics, ethics, and 
aesthetics (so far as the last two can be called 
sciences at all) result. Conceptual knowledge 
must thus be called a self-sufficing revelation; 
and by rationalistic writers it has always been 
treated as admitting us to a diviner world, the 
world of universal rather than that of perish- 
ing facts, of essential qualities, immutable rela- 
tions, eternal principles of truth and right. 
Emerson writes: ‘Generalization is always a 
new influx of divinity into the mind : hence the 

56 


PERCEPT AND CONCEPT 


thrill that attends it.’ And a disciple of Hegel, 
after exalting the knowledge of ‘the General, 
Unchangeable, and alone Valuable’ above that 
of ‘the Particular, Sensible and Transient,’ 
adds that if you reproach philosophy with 
being unable to make a single grass-blade grow, 
or even to know how it does grow, the reply is 
that since such a particular ‘how’ stands not 
above but below knowledge, strictly so-called, 
such an ignorance argues no defect. 1 

To this ultra-rationalistic opinion the em- 
piricist contention that the significance of con- 
Concept- cepts consists always in their relation 
Tedge 1 — 1° perceptual particulars has been op- 
^ e . posed. Made of percepts, or distilled 
view from parts of percepts, their essen- 

tial office, it has been said, is to coalesce with 


percepts again, bringing the mind back into 
the perceptual world with a better command of 
the situation there. Certainly whenever we 
can do this with our concepts, we do more with 

1 Michelet, Hegel’s Werke, vii, 15, quoted by A. Gratry, De la 
Connaissance de I’Ame,' i, 231. Compare the similar claim for phi- 
losophy in W. Wallace’s Prolegomena to Hegel, 2d ed., 1894, pp. 
28-29, and the long and radical statement of the same view in book 
iv of Ralph Cudworth’s Treatise on Eternal and Immutable Morality. 

57 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 


them than when we leave them flocking with 
their abstract and motionless companions. It 
is possible therefore, to join the rationalists in 
allowing conceptual knowledge to be self-suffic- 
ing, while at the same time one joins the em- 
piricists in maintaining that the full value of 
such knowledge is got only by combining it 
with perceptual reality again. This mediating 
attitude is that which this book must adopt. 
But to understand the nature of concepts 
better we must now go on to distinguish their 
function from their content. 

The concept ‘man,’ to take an example, is 
three things: 1, the word itself; 2, a vague 
picture of the human form which has 

The con- 
tent and its own value in the way of beauty or 

function . 

of con- not; and 3, an instrument tor sym- 
cepts bolizing certain objects from which 
we may expect human treatment when occa- 
sion arrives. Similarly of ‘triangle,’ ‘cosine,’ — 
they have their substantive value both as words 
and as images suggested, but they also have a 
functional value whenever they lead us else- 
where in discourse. 


58 


PERCEPT AND CONCEPT 


There are concepts, however, the image-part 
of which is so faint that their whole value 
seems to be functional. ‘God/ ‘cause/ ‘num- 
ber/ ‘substance,’ ‘soul,’ for example, suggest 
no definite picture; and their significance 
seems to consist entirely in their tendency, in 
the further turn which they may give to our 
action or our thought. 1 We cannot rest in the 
contemplation of their form, as we can in that 
of a ‘circle’ ora ‘man’; we must pass beyond. 

Now however beautiful or otherwise worthy 
of stationary contemplation the substantive 
part of a concept may be, the more important 
part of its significance may naturally be held 
to be the consequences to which it leads. These 

Theprag- ma y e ^^ er * n wa y m &king 
matic rule us think, or in the way of making us 

act. Whoever has a clear idea of these knows 
effectively what the concept practically signi- 
fies, whether its substantive content be inter- 
esting in its own right or not. 

This consideration has led to a method of 

1 On this functional tendency compare H. Taine, On Intelligence,. 
book i, chap, ii (1870). 


59 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 


interpreting concepts to which I shall give the 
name of the Pragmatic Rule. 1 

The pragmatic rule is that the meaning of a 
concept may always be found, if not in some 
sensible particular which it directly designates, 
then in some particular difference in the course 
of human experience which its being true will 
make. Test every concept by the question 
‘What sensible difference to anybody will its 
truth make?’ and you are in the best possible 
position for understanding what it means and 
for discussing its importance. If, questioning 
whether a certain concept be true or false, you 
can think of absolutely nothing that would 
practically differ in the two cases, you may as- 
sume that the alternative is meaningless and 
that your concept is no distinct idea. If two 
concepts lead you to infer the same particular 
consequence, then you may assume that they 
embody the. same meaning under different 
names. 

This rule applies to concepts of every order 

1 Compare W. James, Pragmatism, chap, ii and passim; also Bald- 
win’s Dictionary of Philosophy, article ‘ Pragmatism,’ by C. S. Peirce. 

60 


PERCEPT AND CONCEPT 


of complexity, from simple terms to proposi- 
tions uniting many terms. 

So many disputes in philosophy hinge upon 
ill-defined words and ideas, each side claim- 
ing its own word or idea to be true, that any 
accepted method of making meanings clear 
must be of great utility. No method can be 
handier of application than our pragmatic 
rule. If you claim that any idea is true, assign 
at the same time some difference that its being 
true will make in some possible person’s his- 
tory, and we shall know not only just what you 
are really claiming but also how important an 
issue it is, and how to go to work to verify the 
claim. In obeying this rule we neglect the sub- 
stantive content of the concept, and follow its 
function only. This neglect might seem at first 
sight to need excuse, for the content often has 
a value of its own which might conceivably add 
lustre to reality, if it existed, apart from any 
modification wrought by it in the other parts 
of reality. Thus it is often supposed that 
‘Idealism’ is a theory precious in itself, even 
though no definite change in the details of our 

61 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 


experience can be deduced from it. Later dis- 
cussion will show that this is a superficial view, 
and that particular consequences are the only 
criterion of a concept’s meaning, and the only 
test of its truth. 

Instances are hardly called for, they are so 
obvious. That A and B are ‘ equal,’ for example, 
Examples means either that ‘you will find no 
difference’ when you pass from one to the 
other, or that in substituting one for the other 
in certain operations ‘you will get the same 
result both times.’ ‘Substance’ means that ‘a 
definite group of sensations will recur.’ ‘In- 
commensurable’ means that ‘you are always 
confronted with a remainder.’ ‘Infinite’ 
means either that, or that ‘you can count as 

f 

many units in a part as you can in the whole.’ 
‘More’ and ‘less’ mean certain sensations, 
varying according to the matter. ‘Freedom’ 
means ‘no feeling of sensible restraint.’ ‘Ne- 
cessity ’ means that ‘your way is blocked in all 
directions save one.’ ‘God ’means that ‘you 
can dismiss certain kinds of fear,’ ‘cause’ that 
‘you may expect certain sequences,’ etc. etc. 

62 


PERCEPT AND CONCEPT 

We shall find plenty of examples in the rest of 
this book; so I go back now to the more general 
question of whether the whole import of the 
world of concepts lies in its relation to percep- 
tual experience, or whether it be also an inde- 
pendent revelation of reality. Great ambiguity 
is possible in answering this question, so we 
must mind our Ps and Qs. 

The first thing to notice is that in the earliest 
stages of human intelligence, so far as we can 
guess at them, thought proper must have had 
an exclusively practical use. Men classed their 
Origin of sensations, substituting concepts for 
concepts them, in order to ‘work them for 
utility what they were worth,’ and to pre- 
pare for what might lie ahead. Class-names 
suggest consequences that have attached 
themselves on other occasions to other mem- 
bers of the class — consequences which the 
present percept will also probably or certainly 
show . 1 The present percept in its immediacy 
may thus often sink to the status of a bare sign 

1 For practical uses of conception compare W. James, Principles oj 
Psychology, chap, xxii; J. E. Miller, The Psychology of Thinking, 1909, 
passim, but especially chaps, xv, xvi, xvii. 

63 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 


of the consequences which the substituted con- 
cept suggests. 

The substitution of concepts and their 
connections, of a whole conceptual order, in 
short, for the immediate perceptual flow, thus 
widens enormously our mental panorama. Had 
we no concepts we should live simply ‘ getting ’ 
each successive moment of experience, as the 
sessile sea-anemone on its rock receives what- 
ever nourishment the wash of the waves may 
bring. With concepts we go in quest of the ab- 
sent, meet the remote, actively turn this way or 
that, bend our experience, and make it tell us 
whither it is bound. We change its order, run 
it backwards, bring far bits together and sepa- 
rate near bits, jump about over its surface in- 
stead of plowing through its continuity, string 
its items on as many ideal diagrams as our 
mind can frame. All these are ways of handling 
the perceptual flux and meeting distant parts of 
it; and as far as this primary function of con- 
ception goes, we can only conclude it to be 
what I began by calling it, a faculty superadded 
to our barely perceptual consciousness for its 

64 


PERCEPT AND CONCEPT 


use in practically adapting us to a larger en- 
vironment than that of which brutes take ac- 
count . 1 We harness perceptual reality in con- 
cepts in order to drive it better to our ends. 

Does our conceptual translation of the per- 
ceptual flux enable us also to understand the 
The theo- latter better ? What do we mean 


pretation of the word, we see that the better 
we understand anything the more we are 
able to tell about it . Judged by this test, 
concepts do make us understand our percepts 
better: knowing what these are, we can tell all 
sorts of farther truths about them, based on the 
relation of those whats to other whats. The 
whole system of relations, spatial, temporal, 
and logical, of our fact, gets plotted out. An 
ancient philosophical opinion, inherited from 
Aristotle, is that we do not understand a thing 
until we know it by its causes. When the maid- 
servant says that ‘ the cat ’ broke the tea-cup, 

1 Herbert Spencer in his Psychology, parts iii and iv, has at great 
length tried to show that such adaptation is the sole meaning of our 
intellect. 


retie use 
of con- 
cepts 


by making us ‘ understand ’ ? Apply- 
ing our pragmatic rule to the inter- 


65 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

she would have us conceive the fracture in a 
causally explanatory way. No otherwise when 
Clerk-Maxwell asks us to conceive of gas-elec- 
tricity as due to molecular bombardment. An 
imaginary agent out of sight becomes in each 
case a part of the cosmic context in which we 
now place the percept to be explained ; and the 
explanation is valid in so far as the new causal 
that is itself conceived in a context that makes 
its existence probable, and with a nature 
agreeable to the effects it is imagined to pro- 
duce. All our scientific explanations would 
seem to conform to this simple type of the 
‘ necessary cat.’ The conceived order of nature 
built round the perceived order and explain- 
ing it theoretically, as we say, is only a system 
of hypothetically imagined thats, the whats 
of which harmoniously connect themselves 
with the what of any that which we immediately 
perceive. 

The system is essentially a topographic sys- 
tem, a system of the distribution of things. It 
tells us what ’s what, and where ’s where. In so 
far forth it merely prolongs that opening up of 

66 


PERCEPT AND CONCEPT 

the perspective of practical consequences 
which we found to be the primordial utility of 
the conceiving faculty: it adapts us to an im- 
mense environment. Working by the causes of 
things we gain advantages which we never 
should have compassed had we worked by the 
things alone. 

But in order to reach such results the con- 
cepts in the explanatory system must, I said, 
in the a ‘harmoniously connect.’ What does 

priori 

sciences thi\t mean? Is this also only a prac- 
tical advantage, or is it sometning more? It 
seems something more, for it points to the fact 
that when concepts of various sorts are once 
abstracted or constructed, new relations are 
then found between them, connecting them in 
peculiarly intimate, ‘rational,’ and unchange- 
able ways. In another book 1 I have tried to 
show that these rational relations are all prod- 
ucts of our faculty of comparison and of our 
sense of ‘more.’ 

The sciences which exhibit these relations 
are the so-called a 'priori sciences of mathe- 


1 Principles of Psychology, 1890, chap, xxviii. 

67 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 


matics and logic. 1 But these sciences express 
relations of comparison and identification ex- 
clusively. Geometry and algebra, for example, 
first define certain conceptual objects, and then 
establish equations between them, substituting 
equals for equals. Logic has been defined as 
the ‘ substitution of similars’; and in general 
one may say that the perception of likeness 
and unlikeness generates the whole of ‘ra- 
tional’ or ‘necessary’ truth. Nothing happens 
in the worlds of logic, mathematics or moral 
and aesthetic preference. The static nature of 
the relations in these worlds is what gives to 
the propositions that express them their ‘ eter- 
nal ’ character: The binomial theorem, e. g., 
expresses the value of any power of any sum of 
two terms, to the end of time. 

These vast unmoving systems of universal 
terms form the new worlds of thought of which 
I spoke on page 56. The terms are elements 
(or are framed of elements) abstracted from 

1 The ‘ necessary ’ character of the abstract truths which these 
sciences exhibit is well explained by G. H. Lewes: Problems of Life and 
Mind, Problem 1, chapters iv, xiii, especially p. 405 f. of the English 
edition (1874). 


68 


PERCEPT AND CONCEPT 

the perceptual flux; but in their abstract shape 
we note relations between them (and again be- 
tween these relations) which enable us to set 
up various schemes of fixed serial orders or of 
‘more and more.’ The terms are indeed man- 
made, but the order, being established solely 
by comparison, is fixed by the nature of the 
terms on the one hand and by our power of per- 
ceiving relations on the other. Thus two ab- 
stract twos are always the same as an abstract 
four; what contains the container contains the 
contained of whatever material either be made; 
equals added to equals always give equal re- 
sults, in the world in which abstract equality 
is the only property the terms are supposed to 
possess; the more than the more is more than 
the less, no matter in what direction of more- 
ness we advance; if you dot off a term in one 
series every time you dot one off in another, the 
two series will either never end, or will come 
to an end together, or one will be exhausted 
first, etc. etc. ; the result being those skeletons 
of ‘rational’ or ‘necessary’ truth in which 
our logic- and mathematics-books (sometimes 

69 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 


our philosophy-books) arrange their universal 
terms. 

The ‘rationalization’ of any mass of per- 
ceptual fact consists in assimilating its con- 
And in crete terms, one by one, to so many 
physics terms of the conceptual series, and 
then in assuming that the relations intuitively 
found among the latter are what connect the 
former too. Thus we rationalize gas-pressure 
by identifying it with the blows of hypothetic 
molecules; then we see that the more closely 
the molecules are crowded the more frequent 
the blows upon the containing walls will be- 
come; then we discern the exact proportion- 
ality of the crowding with the number of blows; 
so that finally Mariotte’s empirical law gets 
rationally explained. All our transformations 
of the sense-order into a more rational equiva- 
lent are similar to this one. We interrogate 
the beautiful apparition, as Emerson calls it, 
which our senses ceaselessly raise upon our 
path, and the items there refer us to their 
interpretants in the shape of ideal construc- 
tions in some static arrangement which our 

70 


PERCEPT AND CONCEPT 


mind has already made out of its concepts 
alone. The interpretants are then substituted 
for the sensations, which thus get rationally 
conceived. To ‘explain’ means to coordinate, 
one to one, the thises of the perceptual flow 
with the whats of the ideal manifold, whichever 
it be . 1 

We may well call this a theoretic conquest 
over the order in which nature originally comes. 
The conceptual order into which we translate 
our experience seems not only a means of prac- 
tical adaptation, but the revelation of a deeper 
level of reality in things. Being more constant, 
it is truer, less illusory than the perceptual 
order, and ought to command our attention 
more. 

There is still another reason why conception 

appears such an exalted function. Concepts 

Concepts no t only guide us over the map of 
bring new 

values life, but we revalue life by their use. 
Their relation to percepts is like that of sight 
to touch. Sight indeed helps us by preparing 

1 Compare W. Ostwald: Vorlesungen iiber Naturpkilosophie, Sechste 
Vorlesung. 


71 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 


us for contacts while they are yet far off, but 
it endows us in addition with a new world of 
optical splendor, interesting enough all by 
itself to occupy a busy life. Just so do concepts 
bring their proper splendor. The mere pos- 
session of such vast and simple pictures is an 
inspiring good: they arouse new feelings of 
sublimity, power, and admiration, new inter- 
ests and motivations. 

Ideality often clings to things only when 
they are taken thus abstractly. “Causes, as 
anti-slavery, democracy, etc., dwindle when 
realized in their sordid particulars. Abstrac- 
tions will touch us when we are callous to the 
concrete instances in which they lie embodied. 
Loyal in our measure to particular ideals, we 
soon set up abstract loyalty as something of 
a superior order, to be infinitely loyal to; and 
truth at large becomes a ‘momentous issue’ 
compared with which truths in detail are 
‘poor scraps, mere crumbling successes.’” 1 

1 J. Royce: The Philosophy of Loyalty, 1908, particularly Lecture 
vii, § 5. 

Emerson writes: ‘Each man sees over his own experience a certain 
stain of error, whilst that of other men looks fair and ideal. Let any 

72 


PERCEPT AND CONCEPT 


So strongly do objects that come as universal 
and eternal arouse our sensibilities, so greatly 
do life’s values deepen when we translate per- 
cepts into ideas! The translation appears as 
far more than the original’s equivalent. 

Concepts thus play three distinct parts in hu- 
Summary man life. 

1. They steer us practically every day, and 
provide an immense map of relations among 
the elements of things, which, though not now, 
yet on some possible future occasion, may help 
to steer us practically; 

2. They bring new values into our perceptual 
life, they reanimate our wills, and make our 
action turn upon new points of emphasis ; 

3. The map which the mind frames out of 

man go back to those delicious relations which make the beauty of his 
life, which have given him sincerest instruction and nourishment, he 
will shrink and moan. Alas! I know not why, but infinite compunc- 
tions embitter in mature life the remembrances of budding joy, and 
cover every beloved name. Everything is beautiful seen from the point 
of view of the intellect, or as truth, but all is sour, if seen as experience. 
Details are melancholy; the plan is seemly and noble. In the actual 
world — the painful kingdom of time and place — dwell care, and 
canker, and fear. With thought, with the ideal, is immortal hilarity, 
the rose of Joy. Round it all the muses sing. But grief clings to names 
and persons, and the partial interests of to-day and yesterday.’ ( Essay 
on Love.) 


73 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 


them is an object which possesses, when once 
it has been framed, an independent existence. 
It suffices all by itself for purposes of study. 
The ‘ eternal ’ truths it contains would have to 
be acknowledged even were the world of sense 
annihilated. 

We thus see clearly what is gained and what 
is lost when percepts are translated into con- 
cepts. Perception is solely of the here and now ; 
conception is of the like and unlike, of the 
future, of the past, and of the far away. But 
this map of what surrounds the present, like 
all maps, is only a surface; its features are but 
abstract signs and symbols of things that in 
themselves are concrete bits of sensible experi- 
ence. We have but to weigh extent against 
content, thickness against spread, and we see 
that for some purposes the one, for other pur- 
poses the other, has the higher value. Who 
can decide offhand which is absolutely better 
to live or to understand life? We must do both 
alternately, and a man can no more limit him- 
self to either than a pair of scissors can cut with 
a single one of its blades. 


CHAPTER V 


PERCEPT AND CONCEPT — THE ABUSE 
OF CONCEPTS 1 

In spite of this obvious need of holding our 
percepts fast if our conceptual powers are to 
mean anything distinct, there has always been 
a tendency among philosophers to treat con- 
ception as the more essential thing in know- 
Thein- ledge . 2 The Platonizing persuasion 

tellectual- 

ist creed has ever been that the intelligible 
order ought to supersede the senses rather than 
interpret them. The senses, according to this 
opinion, are organs of wavering illusion that 
stand in the way of ‘knowledge,’ in the unal- 
terable sense of that term. They are an unfor- 
tunate complication on which philosophers 
may safely turn their backs. 

‘Your sensational modalities,’ writes one of 

1 [This chapter and the following chapter do not appear as separate 
chapters in the manuscript. Ed.] 

3 The traditional rationalist view would have it that to understand 
life, without entering its turmoil, is the absolutely better part. Phi- 
losophy’s ‘special work,’ writes William Wallace, ‘is to comprehend the 
world, not try to make it better ’ ( Prolegomena to the Study of Hegel's 
Philosophy, 2d edition, Oxford, 1894, p. 29). 

75 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 


these, ‘are but darkness, remember that. 
Mount higher, up to reason, and you will see 
light. Impose silence on your senses, your 
imagination, and your passions, and you will 
then hear the pure voice of interior truth, the 
clear and evident replies of our common mis- 
tress [reason]. Never confound that evidence 
which results from the comparison of ideas 
with the vivacity of those feelings which move 
and touch you. . . . We must follow reason 
despite the caresses, the threats and the in- 
sults of the body to which we are conjoined, 
despite the action of the objects that surround 
us. ... I exhort you to recognize the differ- 
ence there is between knowing and feeling, 
between our clear ideas, and our sensations 
always obscure and confused .’ 1 

This is the traditional intellectualist creed. 
When Plato, its originator, first thought of 
concepts as forming an entirely separate world 
and treated this as the only object fit for the 
study of immortal minds, he lit up an entirely 

1 Malebranche: Entretiens sur la Metaphysique, 3me. Entretien, 
viii, 9. 


76 


PERCEPT AND CONCEPT 

new sort of enthusiasm in the human breast. 
These objects were precious objects, concrete 
things were dross. Introduced by Dion, who 
had studied at Athens, to the corrupt and 
worldly court of the tyrant of Syracuse, Plato, 
as Plutarch tells us, ‘was received with won- 
derful kindness and respect. . . . The citizens 
began to entertain marvellous hopes of a speedy 
reformation when they observed the modesty 
which now ruled the banquets, and the general 
decorum which reigned in all the court, their 
tyrant also behaving himself with gentleness 
and humanity. . . . There was a general pas- 
sion for reasoning and philosophy, so much so 
that the very palace, it is reported, was filled 
with dust by the concourse of the students in 
mathematics who were working their problems 
there ’ in the sand. Some ‘ professed to be 
indignant that the Athenians, who formerly 
had come to Syracuse with a great fleet and 
numerous army, and perished miserably with- 
out being able to take the city, should now, by 
means of one sophister, overturn the sover- 
eignty of Dionysius ; inveigling him to cashier 

77 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 


his guard of 10,000 lances, dismiss a navy of 
400 galleys, disband an army of 10,000 horse 
and many times over that number of foot, and 
go seek in the schools an unknown and imagin- 
ary bliss, and learn by the mathematics how 
to be happy.* 

Having now set forth the merits of the con- 
ceptual translation, I must proceed to show 
_ . x . its shortcomings. We extend our 

the con- view when we insert our percepts 
ceptual 

transia- into our conceptual map. We learn 
about them, and of some of them we 
transfigure the value; but the map remains 
superficial through the abstractness, and false 
through the discreteness of its elements; and 
the whole operation, so far from making things 
appear more rational, becomes the source of 
quite gratuitous unintelligibilities. Conceptual 
knowledge is forever inadequate to the fulness 
of the reality to be known. Reality consists of 
existential particulars as well as of essences 
and universals and class-names, and of exist- 
ential particulars we become aware only in 
the perceptual flux. The flux can never be 

78 


PERCEPT AND CONCEPT 


superseded. We must carry it with us to the 
bitter end of our cognitive business, keeping it 
in the midst of the translation even when the 
The insu- latter proves illuminating, and fall- 
“ ing back on it alone when the trans- 
11011 lation gives out. ‘ The insuperability 

of sensation ’ would be a short expression of 
my thesis. 

To prove it, I must show: 1. That concepts 
are secondary formations, inadequate, and 
only ministerial; and 2. That they falsify as 
well as omit, and make the flux impossible to 
understand. 

1. Conception is a secondary process, not 
indispensable to life. It presupposes percep- 
tion, which is self-sufficing, as all lower crea- 
tures, in whom conscious life goes on by reflex 
adaptations, show. 

To understand a concept you must know 
what it means. It means always some this, or 
some abstract portion of a this, with which 
we first made acquaintance in the perceptual 
world, or else some grouping of such abstract 
portions. All conceptual content is borrowed : 

79 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 


to know what the concept ‘ color ’ means you 
must have seen red or blue, or green. To know 
what ‘ resistance ’ means, you must have made 
some effort; to know what ‘motion ’ means, you 
must have had some experience, active or pas- 
sive, thereof. This applies as much to con- 
cepts of the most rarified order as to qualities 
like ‘bright’ and ‘loud.’ To know what the 
word ‘illation’ means one must once have 
sweated through some particular argument. 
To know what a ‘proportion’ means one must 
have compared ratios in some sensible case. 
You can create new concepts out of old ele- 
ments, but the elements must have been per- 
ceptually given; and the famous world of 
universals would disappear like a soap-bubble 
if the definite contents of feeling, the thises and 
thats, which its terms severally denote, could 
be at once withdrawn. Whether our concepts 
live by returning to the perceptual world or 
not, they live by having come from it. It is 
the nourishing ground from which their sap is 
drawn. 

2. Conceptual treatment of perceptual real- 
80 


PERCEPT AND CONCEPT 


it y makes it seem paradoxical and incompre- 
hensible; and when radically and consistently 
carried out, it leads to the opinion that per- 
ceptual experience is not reality at all, but an 
appearance or illusion. - 

Briefly, this is a consequence of two facts: 
First, that when we substitute concepts for 
Why con- percepts, we substitute their rela- 


only, it is impossible to substitute them for the 
dynamic relations with which the perceptual 
flux is filled. Secondly, the conceptual scheme, 
consisting as it does of discontinuous terms, can 
only cover the perceptual flux in spots and 
incompletely. The one is no full measure of 
the other, essential features of the flux escaping 
whenever we put concepts in its place. 

This needs considerable explanation, for we 
have concepts not only of qualities and rela- 
tions, but of happenings and actions; and it 
might seem as if these could make the con- 
ceptual order active . 1 But this would be a false 

1 Prof. Hibben, in an article in the Philosophic Review, vol. xix, pp. 


cepts are 
Inade- 
quate 


tions also. But since the relations of 
concepts are of static comparison 


81 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 


interpretation. The concepts themselves are 
fixed, even though they designate parts that 
move in the flux; they do not act, even though 
they designate activities; and when we substi- 
tute them and their order, we substitute a 
scheme the intrinsically stationary nature of 
which is not altered by the fact that some of 
its terms symbolize changing originals. The 
concept of ‘change,’ for example, is always that 

125 ff. (1910), seeks to defend the conceptual order against attacks 
similar to those in the text, which, he thinks, come from misapprehen- 
sions of the true function of logic. ‘ The peculiar function of thought 
is to represent the continuous,’ he says, and he proves it by the exam- 
ple of the calculus. I reply that the calculus, in substituting for cer- 
tain perceptual continuities its peculiar symbols, lets us follow changes 
point by point, and is thus their practical, but not their sensible equiv- 
alent. It cannot reveal any change to one who never felt it, but it can 
lead him to where the change would lead him. It may practically re- 
place the change, but it cannot reproduce it. What I am contending 
for is that the non-reproducible part of reality is an essential part of 
the content of philosophy, whilst Hibben and the logicists seem to 
believe that conception, if only adequately attained to, might be all- 
sufficient. ‘It is the peculiar duty and privilege of philosophy,’ Mr. 
Hibben writes, ‘ to exalt the prerogatives of intellect.’ He claims that 
universals are able to deal adequately with particulars, and that con- 
cepts do not so exclude each other, as my text has accused them of 
doing. Of course ‘synthetic’ concepts abound, with subconcepts in- 
cluded in them, and the a priori world is full of them. But they are 
all designative; and I think that no careful reader of my text will ac- 
cuse me of identifying ‘ knowledge ’ with either perception or concep. 
tion absolutely or exclusively. Perception gives * intension,’ concep- 
tion gives ‘extension ’ to our knowledge. 

82 


PERCEPT AND CONCEPT 


fixed concept. If it changed, its original self 
would have to stay to mark what it had changed 
from; and even then the change would be a 
perceived continuous process, of which the 
translation into concepts could only consist in 
the judgment that later and earlier parts of it 
differed — such ‘ differences ’ being conceived 
as absolutely static relations. 

Whenever we conceive a thing we define it ; 

Origin of and jf we s till don’t understand, we 
intellect- 

uaiism define our definition. Thus I define 
a certain percept by saying ‘this is motion,’ or 
‘ I am moving ’ ; and then I define motion by 
calling it the ‘being in new positions at new 
moments of time.’ This habit of telling what 
everything is becomes inveterate. The farther 
we pUsh it, the more we learn about our subject 
of discourse, and we end by thinking that 
knowing the latter always consists in getting 
farther and farther away from the perceptual 
type of experience. This uncriticized habit, 
added to the intrinsic charm of the conceptual 
form, is the source of ‘intellectualism’ in phi- 
losophy. 


83 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 


But intellectualism quickly breaks down. 
When we try to exhaust motion by conceiving 


uum given, you can make cuts and dots in it, 
ad libitum, enumerating the dots and cuts will 
not give you your continuum back. The ra- 
tionalist mind admits this; but instead of see- 
ing that the fault is with the concepts, it 
blames the perceptual flux. This, Kant con- 
tends, has no reality in itself, being a mere 
apparitional birth-place for concepts, to be 
substituted indefinitely. When these them- 
selves are seen never to attain to a completed 
sum, reality is sought by such thinkers outside 
both of the perceptual flow and of the concept- 
ual scheme. Kant lodges it before the flow, in 
the shape of so-called ‘things in themselves ’; 1 
others place it beyond perception, as an Abso- 
lute (Bradley), or represent it as a Mind whose 

1 ‘ We must suppose Noumena,’ says Kant, ‘ in order to set bounds 
to the objective validity of sense-knowledge’ ( Krit . d. reinen Ver- 
nunft, 2d ed., p. 310). The old moral need of somehow rebuking 
‘ Sinnlichkeit’! 


Inade- 
quacy of 
intellectu- 
alism 


it as a summation of parts, ad in- 
finitum, we find only insufficiency. 
Although, when you have a contin- 


84 


PERCEPT AND CONCEPT 


ways of thinking transcend ours (Green, the 
Cairds, Royce). In either case, both our per- 
cepts and our concepts are held by such phi- 
losophers to falsify reality; but the concepts 
less than the percepts, for they are static, and 
by all rationalist authors the ultimate reality 
is supposed to be static also, while perceptual 
life fairly boils over with activity and change. 

If we take a few examples, we can see how 
many of the troubles of philosophy come from 

Examples assuming that to be understood (or 
of puzzles 

intro- known in the only worthy sense of 


ceptuai cut j n |- 0 discrete bits and pinned 


Example 1. Activity and causation are in- 
comprehensible, for the conceptual scheme 
yields nothing like them. Nothing happens 
therein: concepts are ‘timeless,’ and can only 
be juxtaposed and compared. The concept 
‘dog’ does not bite; the concept ‘cock’ does 
not crow. So Hume and Kant translate the 
fact of causation into the crude juxtaposition 
of two phenomena. Later authors, wishing to 


duced 
by con- 


the word) our flowing life must be 


transla- 

tion 


upon a fixed relational scheme. 


85 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

mitigate the crudeness, resolve the adjacency, 
whenever they can, into identity: cause and 
effect must be the same reality in disguise, and 
our perception of difference in these successions 
thus becomes an illusion. Lotze elaborately 
establishes that the ‘influencing’ of one thing 
by another is inconceivable. ‘Influence’ is a 
concept, and, as such, a distinct third thing, 
to be identified neither with the agent nor the 
patient. What becomes of it on its way from 
the former to the latter? And when it finds the 
latter, how does it act upon it? By a second 
influence which it puts forth in turn? — But 
then again how? and so forth, and so forth till 
our whole intuition of activity gets branded as 
illusory because you cannot possibly reproduce 
its flowing substance by juxtaposing the dis- 
crete. Intellectualism draws the dynamic con- 
tinuity out of nature as you draw the thread 
out of a string of beads. 

Example 2. Knowledge is impossible ; for 
knower is one concept, and known is another. 
Discrete, separated by a chasm, they are mu- 
tually ‘transcendent’ things, so that how an 

86 


PERCEPT AND CONCEPT 

object can ever get into a subject, or a subject 
ever get at an object, has become the most 
unanswerable of philosophic riddles. An insin- 
cere riddle, too, for the most hardened ‘epis- 
temologist’ never really doubts that know- 
ledge somehow does come off. 

Example 3. Personal identity is conceptually 
impossible. ‘Ideas’ and ‘states of mind’ are 
discrete concepts, and a series of them in time 
means a plurality of disconnected terms. To 
such an atomistic plurality the associationists 
reduce our mental life. Shocked at the discon- 
tinuous character of their scheme, the spiritu- 
alists assume a ‘soul’ or ‘ego’ to melt the 
separate ideas into one collective consciousness. 
But this ego itself is but another discrete con- 
cept; and the only way not to pile up more 
puzzles is to endow it with an incomprehensi- 
ble power of producing that very character of 
manyness-in-oneness of which rationalists re- 
fuse the gift when offered in its immediate per- 
ceptual form. 

Example 4. Motion and change are impos- 
sible. Perception changes pulsewise, but the 

87 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

pulses continue each other and melt their 
bounds. In conceptual translation, however, a 
continuum can only stand for elements with 
other elements between them ad infinitum, all 
separately conceived; and such an infinite 
series can never be exhausted by successive 
addition. From the time of Zeno the Eleatic, 
this intrinsic contradictoriness of continuous 
change has been one of the worst skulls at 
intellectualism’s banquet. 

Example 5. Resemblance, in the way in 
which we naively perceive it, is an illusion. Re- 
semblance must be defined; and when defined 
it reduces to a mixture of identity with other- 
ness. To know a likeness understandingly we 
must be able to abstract the identical point 
distinctly. If we fail of this, we remain in our 
perceptual limbo of ‘confusion.’ 

Example 6. Our immediate life is full of the 
sense of direction, but no concept of the direction 
of a process is possible until the process is com- 
pleted. Defined as it is by a beginning and an 
ending, a direction can never be prospectively 
but only retrospectively known. Our percept- 

88 


PERCEPT AND CONCEPT 


ual discernment beforehand of the way we are 
going, and all our dim foretastes of the future, 
have therefore to be treated as inexplicable 
or illusory features of experience. 

Example 7. No real thing can be in two rela- 
tions at once; the same moon, for example, can- 
not be seen both by you and by me. For the 
concept ‘seen by you’ is not the concept ‘seen 
by me’; and if, taking the moon as a gram- 
matical subject and, predicating one of these 
concepts of it, you then predicate the other 
also, you become guilty of the logical sin of 
saying that a thing can both be A and not-A 
at once. Learned trifling again; for clear 
though the conceptual contradictions be, no- 
body sincerely disbelieves that two men see the 
same thing. 

Example 8. No relation can be comprehended 
or held to be real in the form in which we inno- 
cently assume it. A relation is a distinct con- 
cept; and when you try to make two other con- 
cepts continuous by putting a relation between 
them, you only increase the discontinuity. 
You have now conceived three things instead 

89 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 


of two, and have two gaps instead of one to 
bridge over. Continuity is impossible in the 
conceptual world. 

Example 9. The very relation of subject to 
'predicate in our judgments, the backbone of con- 
ceptual thinking itself, is unintelligible and self - 
contradictory. Predicates are ready-made uni- 
versal ideas by which we qualify perceptual 
singulars or other ideas. Sugar, for example, 
we say ‘ is ’ sweet. But if the sugar was already 
sweet, you have made no step in knowledge; 
whilst if not so already, you are identifying it 
with a concept, with which, in its universality, 
the particular sugar cannot be identical. Thus 
neither the sugar as described, nor your de- 
scription, is comprehensible. 1 

1 I have cited in the text only such conceptual puzzles as have be- 
come classic in philosophy, but the concepts current in physical science 
have also developed mutual oppugnancies which (although not yet 
classic commonplaces in philosophy) are beginning to make physicists 
doubt whether such notions develop unconditional ‘truth.’ Many 
physicists now think that the concepts of ‘matter,’ ‘mass,’ ‘atom,’ 
‘ether,’ ‘inertia,’ ‘force,’ etc. are not so much duplicates of hidden 
realities in nature as mental instruments to handle nature by after- 
eubstitution of their scheme. They are considered, like the kilogram 
or the imperial yard, ‘ artefacts,’ not revelations. The literature here is 
copious: J. B. Stallo’s Concepts and Theories of Modern Physics (1882); 
pp. 136-140 especially, are fundamental. Mach, Ostwald, Pearson 

90 


PERCEPT AND CONCEPT 


These profundities of inconceivability, and 
many others like them, arise from the vain 
Attitude attempt to reconvert the manifold 
losophers into which our conception has re- 

‘diaiectic ’ s0 ^ ve ^ things, back into the con- 
difficulties tinuum out of which it came. The 
concept ‘many’ is not the concept ‘one’; 
therefore the manyness-in-oneness which per- 
ception offers is impossible to construe intel- 
lectually. Youthful readers will find such 
difficulties too whimsical to be taken seriously; 
but since the days of the Greek sophists these 
dialectic puzzles have lain beneath the surface 
of all our thinking like the shoals and snags in 
the Mississippi river; and the more intellectu- 
ally conscientious the thinkers have been, the 
less they have allowed themselves to disregard 
them. But most philosophers have noticed 
this or that puzzle only, and ignored the others* 
The pyrrhonian Sceptics first, then Hegel , 1 

v 

then in our day Bradley and Bergson, are the 
only writers I know who have faced them col- 

Duhem, Milhaud, LeRoy, Wilbois, H. Poincare, are other critics of a 
similar sort. 

1 I omit Herbart, perhaps wrongly. 

91 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 


lectively, and proposed a solution applicable 
to them all. 

The sceptics gave up the whole notion of 
truth light-heartedly, and advised their pupils 
The seep- not t Q care about it . 1 Hegel wrote so 

tics and 

Hegel abominably that I cannot under- 
stand him, and will say nothing about him 
here . 2 Bradley and Bergson write with beauti- 
ful clearness and their arguments continue all 
that I have said. 

Mr. Bradley agrees that immediate feeling 
possesses a native wholeness which conceptual 
Bradley treatment analyzes into a many, but 
ceptand cannot unite again. In every ‘ this ’ 
concept as mere ly f e Jt 5 Bradley says, we ‘en- 
counter’ reality, but we encounter it only as a 
fragment, see it, as it were, only ‘through a 


1 See any history of philosophy, sub voce ‘ Pyrrho.’ 

2 Hegel connects immediate perception with ideal truth by a ladder 
of intermediary concepts — at least, I suppose they are concepts. The 
best opinion among his interpreters seems to be that ideal truth does 
not abolish immediate perception, but preserves it as an indispensable 
* moment.’ Compare, e. g., H. W. Dresser: The Philosophy of the Spirit, 
1908; Supplementary Essay: ‘On the Element of Irrationality in the 
Hegelian Dialectic.’ In other words Hegel does not pull up the ladder 
after him when he gets to the top, and may therefore be counted as a 
non-intellectualist, in spite of his desperately intellectualist tone. 

92 


PERCEPT AND CONCEPT 


hole .’ 1 Our sole practicable way of extending 
and completing this fragment is by using our 
intellect with its universal ideas. But with ideas, 
that harmonious compenetration of manyness- 
in-oneness which feeling originally gave is no 
longer possible. Concepts indeed extend our 
this , but lose the inner secret of its wholeness; 
when ideal ‘truth’ is substituted for ‘reality’ 
the very nature of ‘reality’ disappears. 

The fault being due entirely to the concep- 
tual form in which we have to think things, one 
might naturally expect that one who recognizes 
its inferiority to the perceptual form as clearly 
as Mr. Bradley does, would try to save both 
forms for philosophy, delimiting their scopes, 
and showing how, as our experience works, 
they supplement each other. This is M. Berg- 
son’s procedure ; but Bradley, though a traitor 
to orthodox intellectualism in holding fast to 
feeling as a revealer of the inner oneness of 
reality, has yet remained orthodox enough to 
refuse to admit immediate feeling into ‘philos- 
ophy’ at all. ‘For worse or for better,’ he 

1 F. H. Bradley: The Principles of Logic, book i, chap, ii, pp. 29-32. 

93 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

writes, 'the man who stays on particular feel- 
ing must remain outside philosophy.’ The 
philosopher’s business, according to Mr. Brad- 
ley, is to qualify the real ‘ideally ’ (i. e. by con- 
cepts), and never to look back. The ‘ideas’ 
meanwhile yield nothing but a patchwork, and 
show no unity like that which the living per- 
ception gave. What shall one do in these per- 
plexing circumstances? Unwilling to go back, 
Bradley only goes more desperately forward. 
He makes a flying leap ahead, and assumes, 
beyond the vanishing point of the whole con- 
ceptual perspective, an ‘absolute’ reality, in 
which the coherency of feeling and the com- 
pleteness of the intellectual ideal shall unite in 
some indescribable way. Such an absolute 
totality -in unity can be, it must be, it shall be, 
it is he says. Upon this incomprehensible 
metaphysical object the Bradleyan metaphysic 
establishes its domain . 1 

The sincerity of Bradley’s criticisms has 
cleared the air of metaphysics and made havoc 

1 Mr. Bradley has expressed himself most pregnantly in an article 
in volume xviii, N. S. of Mind, p. 489. See also his Appearance and 
Reality, passim, especially the Appendix to the second edition. 

94 


PERCEPT AND CONCEPT 


with old party lines. But, critical as he is, 
Mr. Bradley preserves one prejudice uncriti- 
Criticism cized. Perception ‘untransmuted,’ 
of Bradley jj e mus t not, cannot, shall 

not, enter into final ‘truth.’ 

Such loyalty to a blank direction in thought, 
no matter where it leads you, is pathetic : con- 
cepts disintegrate — no matter, their way 
must be pursued; percepts are integral — no 
matter, they must be left behind. When anti- 
sensationalism has become an obstinacy like 
this, one feels that it draws near its end. 

Since it is only the conceptual form which 
forces the dialectic contradictions upon the in- 
nocent sensible reality, the remedy would seem 
to be simple. Use concepts when they help, 
and drop them when they hinder understand- 
ing; and take reality bodily and integrally up 
into philosophy in exactly the perceptual shape 
in which it comes. The aboriginal flow of feel- 
ing sins only by a quantitative defect. There is 
always much-at-once of it, but there is never 
enough, and we desiderate the rest. The only 
way to get the rest without wading through all 

95 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 


future time in the person of numberless per- 
ceivers, is to substitute our various conceptual 
systems which, monstrous abridgments though 
they be, are nevertheless each an equivalent, 
for some partial aspect of the full perceptual 
reality which we can never grasp. 

This, essentially, is Bergson’s view of the 
matter, and with it I think that we should rest 
content . 1 

I will now sum up compendiously the result 
of what precedes. If the aim of philosophy 
Summary were the taking full possession of all 
reality by the mind, then nothing short of 
the whole of immediate perceptual experience 
could be the subject-matter of philosophy, for 
only in such experience is reality intimately 
and concretely found. But the philosopher, 
although he is unable as a finite being to com- 
pass more than a few passing moments of such 
experience, is yet able to extend his knowledge 
beyond such moments by the ideal symbol of 

1 Bergson’s most compendious statement of his doctrine is in the 
‘Introduction h. la Metaphysique,’ in the Revue de MStaphysique et de 
Morale, 1903, p. i. For a brief comparison between him and Bradley, 
see an essay by W. James, in the Journal of Philosophy, vol. vii, no. 2. 

96 


PERCEPT AND CONCEPT 


the other moments . 1 He thus commands vi- 
cariously innumerable perceptions that are out 
of range. But the concepts by which he does 
this, being thin extracts from perception, are 
always insufficient representatives thereof ; and, 
although they yield wider information, must 
never be treated after the rationalistic fashion, 
as if they gave a deeper quality of truth. The 
deeper features of reality are found only in 
perceptual experience. Here alone do we ac- 
quaint ourselves with continuity, or the im- 
mersion of one thing in another, here alone with 
self, with substance, with qualities, with ac- 
tivity in its various modes, with time, with 
cause, with change, with novelty, with tend- 
ency, and with freedom. Against all such fea- 
tures of reality the method of conceptual trans- 
lation, when candidly and critically followed 
out, can only raise its non possumus, and brand 
them as unreal or absurd. 

1 It would seem that in ‘ mystical ’ ways, he may extend his vision to 
an even wider perceptual panorama than that usually open to the sci- 
entific mind. I understand Bergson to favor some such idea as this , 
SeeW. James: ‘ ASuggestion about Mysticism,’ Journal of Philosophy, 
vii, 4. The subject of mystical knowledge, as yet very imperfectly un- 
derstood, has been neglected both by philosophers and scientific men. 


CHAPTER VI 


PERCEPT AND CONCEPT — SOME 
COROLLARIES 

The first corollary of the conclusions of the 
foregoing chapter is that the tendency lcnoivn in 
philosophy as empiricism, becomes confirmed. 
Empiricism proceeds from parts to wholes, 
treating the parts as fundamental both in the 
order of being and in the order of our know- 
ledge . 1 In human experience the parts are per- 
i. Novelty cepts, built out into wholes by our 

becomes 

possible conceptual additions. The percepts 
are singulars that change incessantly and never 
return exactly as they were before. This brings 
an element of concrete novelty into our experi- 
ence. This novelty finds no representation in 
- the conceptual method, for concepts are ab- 
stracted from experiences already seen or given, 

1 Naturally this applies in the present place only to the greater 
whole which philosophy considers; the universe namely, and its parts, 
for there are plenty of minor wholes (animal and social organisms, for 
example) in which both the being of the parts and our understanding 
of the parts are founded. 


98 


PERCEPT AND CONCEPT 


and he who uses them to divine the new can 
never do so but in ready-made and ancient 
terms. Whatever actual novelty the future 
may contain (and the singularity and individu- 
ality of each moment makes it novel) escapes 
conceptual treatment altogether. Properly 
speaking, concepts are post-mortem prepara- 
tions, sufficient only for retrospective under- 
standing; and when we use them to define the 
universe prospectively we ought to realize that 
they can give only a bare abstract outline or 
approximate sketch, in the filling out of which 
perception must be invoked. 

Rationalistic philosophy has always aspired 
to a rounded-in view of the whole of things, a 
closed system of kinds, from which the notion 
of essential novelty being possible is ruled out 
in advance. For empiricism, on the other hand, 
reality cannot be thus confined by a conceptual 
ring-fence. It overflows, exceeds, and alters. 
It may turn into novelties, and can be known 
adequately only by following its singularities 
from moment to moment as our experience 
grows. Empiricist philosophy thus renounces 

99 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 


the pretension to an all-inclusive vision. It 
ekes out the narrowness of personal experience 
by concepts which it finds useful but not 
sovereign; but it stays inside the flux of life 
expectantly, recording facts, not formulat- 
ing laws, and never pretending that man’s 
relation to the totality of things as a philoso- 
pher is essentially different from his relation 
to the parts of things as a daily patient or 
agent in the practical current of events. Phi- 
losophy, like life, must keep the doors and 
windows open. 

In the remainder of this book we shall hold 
fast to this empiricist view. We shall insist 
that, as reality is created temporally day by 
day, concepts, although a magnificent sketch- 
map for showing us our bearings, can never 
fitly supersede perception, and that the ‘eter- 
nal’ systems which they form should least of 
all be regarded as realms of being to know 
which is a kind of knowing that casts the know- 
ledge of particulars altogether into the shade. 
That rationalist assumption is quite beside the 
mark. Thus does philosophy prove again that 

100 


PERCEPT AND CONCEPT 


2 . Con- 
ceptual 
systems 
are dis- 
tinct 

realms of 
reality 


essential identity with science which we argued 
for in our first chapter . 1 

The last paragraph does not mean that con- 
cepts and the relations between them are not 
just as ‘ real ’ in their ‘ eternal ’ way as 
percepts are in their temporal way. 
What is it to be ‘real’? The best 
definition I know is that which the 
pragmatist rule gives; ‘anything is 
real of which we find ourselves obliged to take 
account in any way .’ 2 Concepts are thus as 
real as percepts, for we cannot live a moment 
without taking account of them. But the 
‘eternal’ kind of being which they enjoy is in- 
ferior to the temporal kind, because it is so 
static and schematic and lacks so many charac- 
ters which temporal reality possesses. Philoso- 
phy must thus recognize many realms of reality 


1 One way of stating the empiricist contention is to say that the 
‘alogical ’ enters into philosophy on an equal footing with the ‘logical.’ 
Mr. Belfort Bax, in his book, The Roots of Reality (1907), formulates 
his empiricism (such as it is) in this way. (See particularly chap, iii.) 
Compare also E. D. Fawcett: The Individual and Reality, passim, but 
especially part ii, chaps, iv and v. 

2 Prof. A. E. Taylor gives this pragmatist definition in his Elements 
of Metaphysics (1903), p. 51. On the nature of logical reality, cf. B. 
Russell: Principles of Mathematics. 

101 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 


which mutually interpenetrate. The concept- 
ual systems of mathematics, logic, aesthetics, 
ethics, are such realms, each strung upon some 
peculiar form of relation, and each differing 
from perceptual reality in that in no one of 
them is history or happening displayed. Per- 
ceptual reality involves and contains all these 
ideal systems, and vastly more besides. 

A concept, it was said above, means always 

the same thing : Change means always change, 

3 The white always white, a circle always a 

self-same- circle. On this self-sameness of con- 
ness of 

ideal ceptual objects the static and ‘eter- 
nal ’ character of our systems of ideal 
truth is based; for a relation, once perceived to 
obtain, must obtain always, between terms 
that do not alter. But many persons find 
difficulty in admitting that a concept used in 
different contexts can be intrinsically the same. 
When we call both snow and paper ‘ white ’ it is 
supposed by these thinkers that there must be 
two predicates in the field. As James Mill 
says: 1 ‘Every colour is an individual colour, 


1 Analysis of the Human Mind (1869), i, 249. 
102 


PERCEPT AND CONCEPT 


every size is an individual size, every shape is 
an individual shape. But things have no indi- 
vidual colour in common, no individual shape 
in common; no individual size in common; that 
is to say, they have neither shape, colour, nor 
size in common. What, then, is it which they 
have in common which the mind can take into 
view? Those who affirmed that it was some- 
thing, could by no means tell. They substi- 
tuted words for things; using vague and mys- 
tical phrases, which, when examined, meant 
nothing.’ The truth, according to this nominal- 
ist author, is that the only thing that can be pos- 
sessed in common by two objects is the same 
name. Black in the coat and black in the shoe 
are the same in so far forth as both shoe and 
coat are called black — the fact that on this 
view the name can never twice be the ‘ same ’ 
being quite overlooked. What now does the 
concept ‘same’ signify? Applying, as usual, 
the pragmatic rule, we find that when we call 
two objects the same we mean either (a) that -' Br 
no difference can be found between them when 
compared, or (b) that we can substitute the one ^ 

103 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 


for the other in certain operations without 
changing the result. If we are to discuss same- 
ness profitably we must bear these pragmatic 
meanings in mind. 

Do then the snow and the paper show no 
difference in color? And can we use them in- 
differently in operations? They may certainly 
replace each other for reflecting light, or be 
used indifferently as backgrounds to set off 
anything dark, or serve as equally good samples 
of what the word ‘white’ signifies. But the 
snow may be dirty, and the paper pinkish or 
yellowish without ceasing to be called ‘white 
or both snow and paper in one light may differ 
from their own selves in another and still be 
‘ white,’ — so the no-difference criterion seems 
to be at fault. This physical difficulty (which all 
house painters know) of matching two tints so 
exactly as to show no difference seems to be 
the sort of fact that nominalists have in mind 
when they say that our ideal meanings are 
never twice the same. Must we therefore ad- 
mit that such a concept as ‘ white ’ can never 
keep exactly the same meaning? 

104 


PERCEPT AND CONCEPT 

It would be absurd to say so, for we know 
that under all the modifications wrought by 
changing light, dirt, impurity in pigment, etc., 
there is an element of color-quality, different 
from other color-qualities, which we mean that 
our word shall inalterably signify. The impossi- 
bility of isolating and fixing this quality physi- 
cally is irrelevant, so long as we can isolate 
«and fix it mentally, and decide that whenever 
we say ‘white,’ that identical quality, whether 
applied rightly or wrongly, is what we shall be 
held to mean. Our meanings can be the same as 
often as we intend to have them so, quite irre- 
spective of whether what is meant be a physi- 
cal possibility or not. Half the ideas we make 
use of are of impossible or problematic things, 
— zeros, infinites, fourth dimensions, limits 
of ideal perfection, forces, relations sundered 
from their terms, or terms defined only con- 
ceptually, by their relations to other terms 
which may be equally fictitious. ‘White’ 
means a color quality of which the mind ap- 
points the standard, and which it can decree to 
be there under all physical disguises. That 

105 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

white is always the same white. What sense 
can there be in insisting that although we our- 
selves have fixed it as the same, it cannot be 
the same twice over? It works perfectly for 
us on the supposition that it is there self- 
identieally; so the nominalist doctrine is false 
of things of that conceptual sort, and true only 
of things in the perceptual flux. 

What I am affirming here is the platonic 
doctrine that concepts are singulars, that con- 
cept-stuff is inalterable, and that physical 
realities are constituted by the various con- 
cept-stuff s of which they ‘partake.’ It is known 
as ‘ logical realism ’ in the history of philosophy; 
and has usually been more favored by rational- 
istic than by empiricist minds. For rational- 
ism, concept-stuff is primordial and perceptual 
things are secondary in nature. The present 
book, which treats concrete percepts as pri- 
‘‘ mordial and concepts as of secondary origin, 
may be regarded as somewhat eccentric in its 
attempt to combine logical realism with an 
otherwise empiricist mode of thought . 1 


1 For additional remarks in favor of the sameness of conceptual ob- 
106 


PERCEPT AND CONCEPT 


I mean by this that they are made of the 
same kind of stuff, and melt into each other 
4. Con- when we handle them together. How 
percepts could it be otherwise when the con- 
are con- ce pts are like evaporations out of the 
tial bosom of perception, into which they 

condense again whenever practical service 
summons them? No one can tell, of the things 
he now holds in his hand and reads, how much 
comes in through his eyes and fingers, and how 
much, from his apperceiving intellect, unites 
with that and makes of it this particular 
‘book’? The universal and the particular 
parts of the experience are literally immersed 
in each other, and both are indispensable. 
Conception is not like a painted hook, on 
which no real chain can be hung; for we hang 
concepts upon percepts, and percepts upon 
concepts interchangeably and indefinitely; and 
the relation of the two is much more like 
what we find in those cylindrical ‘ panoramas ’ 


jects, see W. James in Mind, vol. iv, 1879, pp. 331-335; F. H. Bradley: 
Ethical Studies (1876), pp. 151-154, and Principles of Logic (1883), pp. 
260 ff., 282 ff. The nominalist view is presented by James Mill, as 
above, and by John Stuart Mill in his System of Logic, Sth ed. i, 77. 

107 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 


in which a painted background continues a real 
foreground so cunningly that one fails to de- 
tect the joint. The world we practically live 
in is one in which it is impossible, except by 
theoretic retrospection, to disentangle the con- 
tributions of intellect from those of sense. They 
are wrapt and rolled together as a gunshot in 
the mountains is wrapt and rolled in fold on 
fold of echo and reverberative clamor. Even 
so do intellectual reverberations enlarge and 
prolong the perceptual experience which they 
envelop, associating it with remoter parts of 
existence. And the ideas of these in turn work 
like those resonators that pick out partial 
tones in complex sounds. They help us to 
decompose our percept into parts and to ab- 
stract and isolate its elements. 

The two mental functions thus play into 
each other’s hands. Perception prompts our 
thought, and thought in turn enriches our per- 
ception. The more we see, the more we think; 
while the more we think, the more we see in 
our immediate experiences, and the greater 
grows the detail and the more significant the 

108 


PERCEPT AND CONCEPT 


articulateness of our perception . 1 Later, when 
we come to treat of causal activity, we shall see 
how practically momentous is this enlargement 
of the span of our knowledge through the wrap- 
ping of our percepts in ideas. It is the whole 
coil and compound of both by which effects are 
determined, and they may then be different 
effects from those to which the perceptual 
nucleus would by itself give rise. But the point 
is a difficult one and at the present stage of our 
argument this brief mention of it must suffice. 

Readers who by this time agree that our con- 
ceptual systems are secondary and on the 
5. An ob- whole imperfect and ministerial forms 

jection 

replied to of being, will now feel able to return 
and embrace the flux of their hourly experience 
with a hearty feeling that, however little of it 
at a time be given, what is given is absolutely 

1 Cf. F. C. S. Schiller: ‘ Thought and Immediacy,’ in the Journal 
of Philosophy, etc., iii, 234. The interpretation goes so deep that 
we may even act as if experience consisted of nothing but the 
different kinds of concept-stuff into which we analyze it. Such 
concept-stuff may often be treated, for purposes of action and even 
of discussion, as if it were a full equivalent for reality. But it is 
needless to repeat, after what precedes, that no amount of it can 
ever be a full equivalent, and that in point of genesis it remains a 
secondary formation. 


109 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 


real. Rationalistic thought, with its exclusive 
interest in the unchanging and the general, 
has always de-realized the passing pulses of 
our life. It is no small service on empiricism’s 
part to have exorcised rationalism’s veto, and 
reflectively justified our instinctive feeling 
about immediate experience. ‘Other world?’ 
says Emerson, ‘there is no other world,’ — 
than this one, namely, in which our several 
biographies are founded. 

‘Natur hat weder Kern noch Scbale; 

Alles ist sie mit einem male. 

Dich priife du nur allermeist, 

Ob du Kern oder Seliale seist.’ 

The belief in the genuineness of each particular 
moment in which we feel the squeeze of this 
world’s life, as we actually do work here, or 
work is done upon us, is an Eden from which 
rationalists seek in vain to expel us, now that 
we have criticized their state of mind. 

But they still make one last attempt, and 
charge us with self-stultification. 

‘Your belief in the particular moments,’ they 
insist, ‘so far as it is based on reflective argu- 

110 


PERCEPT AND CONCEPT 


ment (and is not a mere omission to doubt, like 
that of cows and horses) is grounded in abstrac- 
tion and conception. Only by using concepts 
have you established percepts in reality. The 
concepts are the vital things, then, and the 
percepts are dependent on them for the char- 
acter of “reality” with wdiich your reasoning 
endows them. You stand self -contradicted : 
concepts appear as the sole triumphant instru- 
ments of truth, for you have to employ their 
proper authority, even when seeking to install 
perception in authority above them.’ 

The objection is specious; but it disappears 
the moment one recollects that in the last 
resort a concept can only be designative; and 
that the concept ‘reality,’ which we restore to 
immediate perception, is no new conceptual 
creation, but only a kind of practical relation 
to our Will, perceptively experienced , 1 * Ill which 
reasoning had temporarily interfered with, 
but which, when the reasoning was neutralized 
by still further reasoning, reverted to its 

1 Compare W. James: Principles of Psychology, chap, xxi, “The 

Perception of Reality.’ 


Ill 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 


original seat as if nothing had happened. That 
concepts can neutralize other concepts is one 
of their great practical functions. This an- 
swers also the charge that it is self-contradic- 
tory to use concepts to undermine the credit 
of conception in general. The best way to show 
that a knife will not cut is to try to cut with it. 
Rationalism itself it is that has so fatally un- 
dermined conception, by finding that, when 
worked beyond a certain point, it only piles up 
dialectic contradictions . 1 

1 Compare further, as to this objection, a note in W. James: A Plu- 
ralistic Universe, pp. 339-343. 


CHAPTER VII 


c 


THE ONE AND THE MANY 

The full nature, as distinguished from the full 
amount, of reality, we now believe to be given 
only in the perceptual flux. But, though the 
flux is continuous from next to next, non- 
ad jacent portions of it are separated by parts 
that intervene, and such separation seems in a 
variety of cases to work a positive disconnec- 
tion. The latter part, e. g., may contain no 
element surviving from the earlier part, may 
be unlike it, may forget it, may be shut off 
from it by physical barriers, or whatnot. Thus 

Pluralism when we use our intellect for cutting 
vs. mon- 

ism up the flux and individualizing its 

members, we have (provisionally and prac- 
tically at any rate) to treat an enormous num- 
ber of these as if they were unrelated or related 
only remotely, to one another. We handle 
them piecemeal or distributively, and look at 
the entire flux as if it were their sum or collec- 
tion. This encourages the empiricist notion, 

113 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 


that the parts are distinct and that the whole 
is a resultant. 

This doctrine rationalism opposes, contend- 
ing that the whole is fundamental, that the 
parts derive from it and all belong with one- 
another, that the separations we uncritically 
accept are illusory, and that the entire uni- 
verse, instead of being a sum, is the only gen- 
uine unit in existence, constituting (in the 
words often quoted from d’Alembert) * un seul 
fait et une grande verite .’ 

The alternative here is known as that be- 
tween pluralism and monism. It is the most 
pregnant of all the dilemmas of philosophy, 
although it is only in our time that it has been 
articulated distinctly. Does reality exist dis- 
tributive^? or collectively? — in the shape of 
eaches, every s, anys, eithers? or only in the 
shape of an all or whole ? An identical content 
is compatible with either form obtaining, the 
Latin omnes, or cuncti, or the German alle or 
sammtliche expressing the alternatives famil- 
iarly. Pluralism stands for the distributive, 
monism for the collective form of being. 

114 


THE ONE AND THE MANY 


Please note that pluralism need not be sup- 
posed at the outset to stand for any particular 
kind or amount of disconnection between the 
many things which it assumes. It only has the 
negative significance of contradicting mon- 
ism’s thesis that there is absolutely no discon- 
nection. The irreducible outness of anything, 
however infinitesimal, from anything else, in 
any respect, would be enough, if it were solidly 
established, to ruin the monistic doctrine. 

I hope that the reader begins to be pained 
here by the extreme vagueness of the terms I 
am using. To say that there is ‘no disconnec- 
tion,’ is on the face of it simply silly, for we find 
practical disconnections without number. My 
pocket is disconnected with Mr. Morgan’s 
bank-account, and King Edward VII’s mind is 
disconnected with this book. Monism must 
mean that all such apparent disconnections 
are bridged over by some deeper absolute union 
in which it believes, and this union must in 
some way be more real than the practical 
separations that appear upon the surface. ) 

In point of historical fact monism has gen- 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 


erally kept itself vague and mystical as regards 
the ultimate principle of unity. To be One is 
Kinds of more wonderful than to be many, so 
momsm the principle of things must be One, 
but of that One no exact account is given. 
Plotinus simply calls it the One. ‘The One is 
all things and yet no one of them. ... For 
the very reason that none of them was in the 
One, are all derived from it. Furthermore, in 
order that they may be real existences, the One 
Mystical is not an existence, but the father 
momsm G j? ex j s t enceSt And the generation of 
existence is as it were the first act of gener- 
ation. Being perfect by reason of neither 
seeking nor possessing nor needing anything, 
the One overflows, as it were, and what over- 
flows forms another hypostasis. . . . How 
should the most perfect and primal good 
stay shut up in itself as if it were envious or 
impotent? . . . Necessarily then something 
comes from it .’ 1 

This is like the Hindoo doctrine of the Brah- 

1 Compare the passages in C. M. Bakewell’s Source-Book in Ancient 
Philosophy, pp. 363-370, or the first four books of the Vth Ennead 
generally, in F. Bouillier’s translation. 

116 


THE ONE AND THE MANY 


A __ 

man, or of the Atman. In the Bhagavat-gita 
the holy Krishna speaking for the One, says: 
‘I am the immolation. I am the sacrificial rite. 
I am the libation offered to ancestors. I am the 
drug. I am the incantation. I am the sacrificial 
butter also. I am the fire. I am the incense. I 
am the father, the mother, the sustainer, the 
grandfather of the univers'e — the mystic doc- 
trine, the purification, the syllable “Om” . . . 
the path, the supporter, the master, the wit- 
ness, the habitation, the refuge, the friend, the 
origin, the dissolution, the place, the receptacle, 
the inexhaustible seed. I heat (the world) I 
withhold and pour out the rain. I am ambrosia 
and death, the existing and the non-existing. 
. . . I am the. same to all beings. I have neither 
foe nor friend. . . . Place thy heart on me, wor- 
shipping me, sacrificing to me, saluting me .’ 1 
I call this sort of monism mystical, for it not 
only revels in formulas that defy understand- 
ing , 2 but it accredits itself by appealing to 
states of illumination not vouchsafed to com- 

1 J. C. Thomson’s translation, chap. iv. ' 

2 Al-Ghazzali, the Mohammedan philosopher and mystic, gives a 
more theistic version of essentially the same idea: ‘Allah is the guider 

117 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 


mon men. Thus Porphyry, in his life of Plo- 
tinus, after saying that he himself once had 
such an insight, when 68 years old, adds that 
whilst he lived with Plotinus, the latter four 
times had the happiness of approaching the su- 
preme God and consciously uniting with him 
in a real and ineffable act. 

The regular mystical way of attaining the 
vision of the One is by ascetic training, funda- 
mentally the same in all religious systems. But 
this ineffable kind of Oneness is not strictly 
philosophical, for philosophy is essentially 
talkative and explicit, so I must pass it by. 

The usual philosophic way of reaching deeper 
oneness has been by the conception of sub- 
stance. First used by the Greeks, this notion 


aright and the leader astray ; he does what he wills and decides what he 
wishes; there is no opposer of his decision and no repeller of his decree. 
He created the Garden, and created for it a people, then used them in 
obedience. And he created the Fire, and created for it a people, theD 
used them in rebellion. . . . Then he said, as has been handed down 
from the Prophet: “These arein the Garden, and I carenot; and these 
are in the Fire, and I care not.’’ So he is Allah, the Most High, the 
King, the Reality. He is not asked concerning what he does; but they 
are asked.’ (D. B. MacDonald’s translation, in Hartford Seminary Re- 
cord, January, 1910.) Compare for other quotations, W. James: The 
Varieties of Religious Experience, pp. 415-422. 

118 


THE ONE AND THE MANY 


was elaborated with great care during the 
Middle Ages. Defined as any being that exists 
Monism per se so that it needs no further sub- 

of sub- 
stance ject in which to inhere ( Ens ita per 

se existens , ut non indigeat alio tamquam sub- 
jecto,cui inhaereat, ad existendum) a ‘substance * 
was first distinguished from all ‘accidents 5 
(which do require such a subject of inhesion — 
cujus esse est inesse). It was then identified 
with the ‘ principle of individuality 5 in things, 
and with their ‘essence , 5 and divided into va- 
rious types, for example into first and second, 
simple and compound, complete and incom- 
plete, specific and individual, material and 
spiritual substances. God, on this view, is a 
substance, for he exists per se, as well as a se; 
but of secondary beings, he is the creator, not 
the substance, for once created, they also exist 
per se though not a se. Thus, for scholasticism, 
the notion of substance is only a partial unifier, 
and in its totality, the universe forms a plural- 
ism from the substance-point-of-view . 1 

1 Consult the word ‘substance ’ in the index of any scholastic man- 
ual, such as J. Rickaby: General Metaphysics; A. Stockl: Lehrbuch d. 
Phil.; or P. M. Liberatore: Compendium Logics et Metaphysicce. 

119 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 


Spinoza broke away from the scholastic doc- 
trine. He began his ‘ Ethics ’ by demonstrating 
that only one substance is possible, and that 
that substance can only be the infinite and 
necessary God . 1 This heresy brought reproba- 

1 Spinoza has expressed his doctrine briefly in part i of the Appendix 
to his Ethics: ‘I have now explained,’ he says, ‘the nature of God, and 
his properties; such as that he exists necessarily; that he is unique; 
that what he is and does flows from the sole necessity of his nature; 
that he is the free cause of all things whatever; that all things are in 
God and depend on him in such wise that they can neither be nor be 
conceived without him; and finally, that all things have been predeter- 
mined by God, not indeed by the freedom of his will, or according to 
his good pleasure, but in virtue of his absolute nature or his infinite 
potentiality.’ — Spinoza goes on to refute the vulgar notion of final 
causes. God pursues no ends — if he did he would lack something. He 
acts out of the logical necessity of the fulness of his nature. — I find 
another good monistic statement in a book of the spinozistic type: — 
*. . . The existence of every compound object in manifestation does 
not lie in the object itself, but lies in the universal existence which 
is an absolute unit, containing in itself all that is manifested. All the 
particularized beings, therefore, . . . are incessantly changing one 
into the other, coming and going, forming and dissolving through the 
one universal cause of the potential universe, which is the absolute unit 
of universal existence, depending on the one general law, the one math- 
ematical bond, which is the absolute being, and it changes not in all 
eternity. Thus, ... it is the universe as a whole, in its potential 
being, from which the physical universe is individualized; and its being 
is a mathematical inference from a mathematical or an intellectual 
universe which was and ever is previously formed by an intellect 
standing and existing by itself. This mathematical or intellectual uni- 
verse I call Absolute Intellectuality, the God of the Universe.’ 

(Solomon J. Silberstein: The Disclosures of the Universal Mysteries, 
New York, 1900, pp. 12-13.) 


120 


THE ONE AND THE MANY 


tion on Spinoza, but it has been favored by 
philosophers and poets ever since. The panthe- 
istic spinozistic unity was too sublime a pros- 
pect not to captivate the mind. It was not till 
Locke, Berkeley, and Hume began to put in 
their ‘critical’ work that the suspicion began 
to gain currency that the notion of substance 
might be only a word masquerading in the 
shape of an idea . 1 

Locke believed in substances, yet confessed 

that ‘we have no such clear idea at all, but only 

Critique an uncertain supposition of we know 
of sub- 
stance not what, which we take to be the 

substratum, or support of those ideas we do 
not know .’ 2 He criticized the notion of per- 
sonal substance as the principles of self-same- 

1 No one believes that such words as ‘winter,’ ‘army,’ ‘house,’ de- 
note substances. They designate collective facts, of which the parts 
are held together by means that can be experimentally traced. Even 
when we can’t define what groups the effects together, as in ‘poison,’ 
‘sickness,’ ‘strength,’ we don’t assume a substance, but are willing 
that the word should designate some phenomenal agency yet to be 
found out. Nominalists treat all substances after this analogy, and 
consider ‘matter,’ ‘gold,’ ‘soul,’ as but the names of so many grouped 
properties, of which the bond of union must be, not some unknowable 
substance corresponding to the name, but rather some hidden portion 
of the whole phenomenal fact. 

2 Essay concerning Human Understanding, book i, chap, iv, § 18. 

121 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 


ness in our different minds. Experientially, our 
personal identity consists, he said, in nothing 
more than the functional and perceptible fact 
that our later states of mind continue and re- 
member our earlier ones . 1 

Berkeley applied the same sort of criticism 
to the notion of bodily substance. ‘When I 
consider,’ he says, ‘the two parts (“being” in 
general, and “supporting accidents”) which 
make the signification of the words “material 
substance,” I am convinced there is no distinct 
meaning annexed to them. . . . Suppose an 
intelligence without the help of external bodies 
to be affected with the same train of sensations 
that you are, imprinted in the same order, and 
with like vividness in his mind. I ask whether 
that intelligence hath not all the reason to be- 
lieve the existence of corporeal substances,' 
represented by his ideas, and exciting them in 
his mind, that you can possibly have for be- 
lieving the same thing .’ 2 Certain grouped sensa- 
tions , in short, are all that corporeal sub- 

1 Ibid., book ii, chap, xxvii, §§ 9-27. 

2 Principles oj Human Knowledge, part i, §§ 17, 20. 

122 


THE ONE AND THE MANY 


stances are Jcnoum-as, therefore the only mean- 
ing which the word ‘ matter ’ can claim is that 
it denotes such sensations and their groupings. 
They are the only verifiable aspect of the word. 

The reader will recognize that in these criti- 
cisms our own pragmatic rule is used. What 1 
difference in practical experience is it supposed 
to make that we have each a personal substan- 
tial principle? This difference, that we can re- 
member and appropriate our past, calling it 
‘ mine.’ What difference that in this book there 
is a substantial principle? This, that certain 
optical and tactile sensations cling permanently 
together in a cluster. The fact that certain 
perceptual experiences do seem to belong to- 
gether is thus all that the word substance means,; 
Hume carries the criticism to the last degree of 
clearness. ‘We have no idea of substance,’ he 
says, ‘distinct from that of a collection of par- 
ticular qualities, nor have we any other mean- 
ing when we either talk or reason concerning it. 
The idea of a substance ... is nothing but a 
collection of simple ideas that are united by 
the imagination and have a particular name 

123 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 


assigned them by which we are able to recall 
that collection .’ 1 Kant’s treatment of sub- 
stance agrees with Hume’s in denying all posi- 
tive content to the notion. It differs in insist- 
ing that, by attaching shifting percepts to the 
permanent name, the category of substance 
unites them necessarily together, and thus 
makes nature intelligible . 2 It is impossible to 
assent to this. The grouping of qualities be- 
comes no more intelligible when you call sub- 
stance a ‘category’ than when you call it a 
bare word. 

Let us now turn our backs upon ineffable 
or unintelligible ways of accounting for the 
Pragmatic world’s oneness, and inquire whether, 

analysis of 

oneness instead of being a principle, the ‘ one- 
ness’ affirmed may not merely be a name like 
‘substance,’ descriptive of th giac t that, certain 
specific and verifiable connections are found 
among the parts of the experiential flux. This 

1 Treatise on Human Nature, part 1, § 6. 

2 Critique of Pure Reason : First Analogy of Experience. For further 
criticism of the substance-concept see J. S. Mill: A System of Logic, 
book i, chap, iii, §§ 6-9; B. P. Bowne: Metaphysics, part 1, chap. i. 
Bowne uses the words being and substance as synonymous. 

124 


THE ONE AND THE MANY 

brings us back to our pragmatic rule : Suppose 
there is a oneness in things, what may it be 
known-as? What differences to you and me 
will it make? 

Our question thus turns upside down, and 
sets us on a much more promising inquiry. We 
can easily conceive of things that shall have 
no connection whatever with each other. We 
may assume them to inhabit different times 
and spaces, as the dreams of different persons 
do even now. They may be so unlike and in- 
commensurable, and so inert towards one an- 
other, as never to jostle or interfere. Even now 
there may actually be whole universes so dis- 
parate from ours that we who know ours have 
no means of perceiving that they exist. We con- 
ceive their diversity, however; and by that fact 
the whole lot of them form what is known in 
logic as one ‘universe of discourse.’ To form 
a universe of discourse argues, as this example 
shows, no further kind of connection. The im- 
portance attached by certain monistic writers 
to the fact that any chaos may become a uni- 
verse by being merely named, is to me incom- 

125 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 


prehensible. We must seek something better in 
the way of oneness than this susceptibility of 
being mentally considered together, and named 
by a collective noun. 

What connections may be perceived con- 
cretely or in point of fact, among the parts 
of the collection abstractly designated as our 
‘world ’? 

There are innumerable modes of union 
among its parts, some obtaining or^a larger, 
some on a smaller scale. Not all the parts of 
our world are united mechanically, for some 
can move without the others moving. They all 
seem united by gravitation, however, so far as 
Kinds of they are material things. Some again 
oneness Q f these are united chemically, while 
others are not; and the like is true of thermic, 
optical, electrical, and other 'physical connec- 
tions. These connections are specifications of 
w r hat we mean by the word oneness when we 
apply it to our world. We should not call it one 
unless its parts were connected in these and 
other ways. But then it is clear that by the 
same logic we ought to call it ‘many.’ so far as 

126 


THE ONE AND THE MANY 

its parts are disconnected in these same ways, 
chemically inert towards one another or non- 
conductors to electricity, light and heat. In 
all these modes of union, some parts of the 
world prove to be conjoined with other parts, 
so that if you choose your line of influence 
and your items rightly, you may travel from 
pole to pole without an interruption. If, how- 
ever, you choose them wrongly, you meet 
with obstacles and non-conductors from the 
outset, and cannot travel at all. There is 
thus neither absolute oneness nor absolute 
manyness from the physical point of view, 
but a mixture of well-definable modes of 
both. Moreover, neither the oneness nor the 
manyness seems the more essential attribute, 
they are co-ordinate features of the natural 
world. 

There are plenty of other practical differ- 
ences meant by calling a thing One. Our world, 
being strung along in time and space, has tem- 
poral and spatial unity. But time and space 
relate things by determinately sundering them, 
so it is hard to say whether the world ought 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 


more to be called ‘ one ’ or ‘ many ’ in this spatial 
or temporal regard. 

The like is true of the generic oneness which 
comes from so many of the world’s parts being 
similar. When two things are similar you can 
make inferences from the one which will hold 
good of the other, so that this kind of union 
among things, so far as it obtains, is inexpres- 
sibly precious from the logical point of view. 
But an infinite heterogeneity among things 
exists alongside of whatever likeness of kind 
we discover; and our world appears no more 
distinctly or essentially as a One than as a 
Many, from this generic point of view. 

We have touched on the noetic unity pre- 
dicable of the world in consequence of our 
being able to mean the whole of it at once. 
Widely different from unification by an ab- 
stract designation, would be the concrete noetic 
union wrought by an all-knower of perceptual 
type who should be acquainted at one stroke 
with every part of what exists. In such an ab- 
solute all-knower idealists believe. Kant, they 
say, virtually replaced the notion of Substance, 

128 


THE ONE AND THE MANY 


by the more intelligible notion of Subject. The 
T am conscious of it,’ which on some witness’s 
part must accompany every possible experi- 
ence, means in the last resort, we are told, one 
individual witness of the total frame of things, 
world without end, amen. You may call his 
undivided act of omniscience instantaneous or 
eternal, whichever you like, for time is its ob- 
ject just as everything else is, and itself is not 
in time. 

We shall find reasons later for treating noetic 

monism as an unverified hypothesis. Over 

Unity by against it there stands the noetic 
concate- 
nation pluralism which we verify every 

moment when we seek information from our 

friends. According to this, everything in the 

world might be known by somebody, yet not 

everything by the same knower, or in one single 

cognitive act, — much as all mankind is knit 

in one network of acquaintance, A knowing B, 

B knowing C, — Y knowing Z, and Z possibly 

knowing A again, without the possibility of 

anyone knowing everybody at once. This 

‘concatenated’ knowing, going from next to 

129 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 


next, is altogether different from the * consoli- 
dated’ knowing supposed to be exercised by 
the absolute mind. It makes a coherent type 
of universe in which the widest knower that 
exists may yet remain ignorant of much that 
is known to others. 

There are other systems of concatenation 
besides the noetic concatenation. We ourselves 
are constantly adding to the connections of 
things, organizing labor-unions, establishing 
postal, consular, mercantile, railroad, tele- 
graph, colonial, and other systems that bind 
us and things together in ever wider reticula- 
tions. Some of these systems involve others, 
some do not. You cannot have a telephone 
system without air and copper connections, 
but you can have air and copper connections 
without telephones. You cannot have love 
without acquaintance, but you can have ac- 
quaintance without love, etc. The same thing, 
moreover, can belong to many systems, as 
when a man is connected with other objects by 
heat, by gravitation, by love, and by know- 
ledge. 


130 


THE ONE AND THE MANY 


From the point of view of these partial sys - 4 
terns, the world hangs together from next to 
next in a variety of ways, so that when you 
are off of one thing you can always be on to 
something else, without ever dropping out of 
your world. Gravitation is the only positively 
known sort of connection among things that 
reminds us of the consolidated or monistic 
form of union. If a ‘mass’ should change any- 
where, the mutual gravitation of all things 
would instantaneously alter. 

Teleological and aesthetic unions are other 
forms of systematic union. The world is full 
Unity of 0 f partial purposes, of partial stories. 

purpose, 

meaning That they all form chapters of one 
supreme purpose and inclusive story is the 
monistic conjecture. They seem, meanwhile, 
simply to run alongside of each other — either 
irrelevantly, or, where they interfere, leading 
to mutual frustrations, — so the appearance 
of things is invincibly pluralistic from this 
purposive point of view. 

It is a common belief that all particular be- 
ings have one origin and source, either in God, 

131 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 


or in atoms all equally old. There is no 
real novelty, it is believed, in the universe, 
Unity of the new things that appear having 
ongm either been eternally prefigured in 
the absolute, or being results of the same pri- 
mordia rerum, atoms, or monads, getting into 
new mixtures. But the question of being is so 
obscure anyhow, that whether realities have 
burst into existence all at once, by a single 
‘bang,’ as it were; or whether they came piece- 
meal, and have different ages (so that real 
novelties may be leaking into our universe all 
the time), may here be left an open question, 
though it is undoubtedly intellectually eco- 
nomical to suppose that all things are equally 
old, and that no novelties leak in. 

These results are what the Oneness of the 
Universe is hnown-as. They are the oneness, 
Summary pragmatically considered. A world 
coherent in any of these ways would be no 
chaos, but a universe of such or such a 
grade. (The grades might differ, however. The 
parts, e. g., might have space-relations, but 
nothing more; or they might also gravitate; or 

132 


THE ONE AND THE MANY 


exchange heat; or know, or love one another, 
etc.) 

Such is the cash-value of the world’s unity, 
empirically realized. Its total unity is the sumo 
of all the partial unities. It consists of them 
and follows upon them. Such an idea, however, 
outrages rationalistic minds, which habitually 
despise all this practical small-change. Such 
minds insist on a deeper, more through-and- 
through union of all things in the absolute, 
‘each in all and all in each,’ as the prior con- 
dition of these empirically ascertained connec- 
tions. But this may be only a case of the usual 
worship of abstractions, like calling ‘bad 
weather’ the cause of to-day’s rain, etc., or 
accounting for a man’s features by his ‘face,’ 
when really the rain is the bad weather, is 
what you mean by ‘bad weather,’ just as the 
features are what you mean by the face. 

To sum up, the world is ‘one’ in some re- 
spects, and ‘many’ in others. But the respects 
must be distinctly specified, if either statement 
is to be more than the emptiest abstraction. 
Once we are committed to this soberer view, 

133 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 


the question of the One or the Many may well 
cease to appear important. The amount either \ 
of unity or of plurality is in short only a matter | 
for observation to ascertain and write down, ^ 
in statements which will have to be compli- J 
cated, in spite of every effort to be concise. / 


CHAPTER VIII * 1 


THE ONE AND THE MANY (continued) — 
VALUES AND DEFECTS 

We might dismiss the subject with the pre- 
ceding chapter 2 were it not for the fact that 
further consequences follow from the rival 
hypotheses, and make of the alternative of 
monism or pluralism what I called it on page 
114, the most ‘pregnant’ of all the dilemmas 
of metaphysics. 

To begin with, : the attribute ‘one’ seems 
for many persons to confer a value, an ineffable 
The illustriousness and dignity upon the 

monistic 

theory world, with which the conception of 
it as an irreducible ‘many’ is believed to clash. 

Secondly, a through - and - through noetic 
connection of everything with absolutely ev- 
erything else is in some quarters held to be 
indispensable to the world’s rationality. Only 
then might we believe that all things really do 

1 [This chapter was not indicated as a separate chapter in the manu- 
script. Ed.] 

2 For an amplification of what precedes, the lecture on ‘The One 
and the Many ’ in W. James: Pragmatism (1907), may be referred to. 

135 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 


belong together, instead of being connected by 
the bare conjunctions ‘with’ or ‘and.’ The 
notion that this latter pluralistic arrangement 
may obtain is deemed ‘irrational’; and of 
course it does make the world partly alogical 
or non-rational from a purely intellectual point 
of view. 

Monism thus holds the oneness to be the 
more vital and essential element. The entire 
The value cosmos must be a consolidated unit. 


and from which the slightest incipiency of in- 
dependence anywhere is ruled out. With Spin- 
oza, monism likes to believe that all things 
follow from the essence of God as necessarily 
as from the nature of a triangle it follows that 
the angles are equal to two right angles. The 
whole is what yields the parts, not the parts the 
whole. The universe is tight , monism claims, 
not loose; and you must take the irreducible 
whole of it just as it is offered, or have no 
part or lot in it at all. The only alternative 
allowed by monistic writers is to confess the 


of abso- 
lute one- 
ness 


within which each member is deter- 
mined by the whole to be just that. 


136 


THE ONE AND THE MANY 


world’s non-rationality — and no philosopher 
can permit himself to do that. The form of 
monism regnant at the present day in phi- 
losophic circles is absolute idealism. For this 
way of thinking, the world exists no otherwise 
than as the object of one infinitely knowing 
mind. The analogy that suggests the hypothe- 
sis here is that of our own finite fields of con- 
sciousness, which at every moment envisage 
a much-at-once composed of parts related va- 
riously, and in which both the conjunctions 
and the disjunctions that appear are there only 
in so far as we are there as their witnesses, so 
that they are both ‘noetically’ and monisti- 
cally based. 

We may well admit the sublimity of this 
noetic monism and of its vague vision of an 
underlying connection among all phenomena 
without exception . 1 It shows itself also able to 
confer religious stability and peace, and it in- 
vokes the authority of mysticism in its favor. 
Yet, on the other hand, like many another con- 

1 In its essential features, Spinoza was its first prophet, Fichte and 
Hegel were its middle exponents, and Josiah Royce is its best contem- 
porary representative. 


137 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 


cept unconditionally carried out, it introduces 
its defects into philosophy puzzles peculiar to 
itself, as follows: — 

1. It does not account for our finite con- 
sciousness. If nothing exists but as the Abso- 
lute Mind knows it, how can anything exist 
otherwise than as that Mind knows it? That 
Mind knows each thing in one act of know- 
ledge, along with every other thing. Finite 
minds know things without other things, and 
this ignorance is the source of most of their 
woes. We are thus not simply objects to an all- 
knowing subject: we are subjects on our own 
account and know differently from its knowing. 

2. It creates a problem of evil. Evil, for plu- 
ralism, presents only the practical problem of 
how to get rid of it. For monism the puzzle is 
theoretical : How — if Perfection be the source, 
should there be Imperfection? If the world 
as known to the Absolute be perfect, why 
should it be known otherwise, in myriads of 
inferior finite editions also? The perfect edi- 
tion surely was enough. How do the breakage 
and dispersion and ignorance get in? 

138 


THE ONE AND THE MANY 


3. It contradicts the character of reality as 
perceptually experienced. Of our world, change 
seems an essential ingredient. There is history. 
There are novelties, struggles, losses, gains. 
But the world of the Absolute is represented 
as unchanging, eternal, or ‘out of time,’ and is 
foreign to our powers either of apprehension 
or of appreciation. Monism usually treats the 
sense-world as a mirage or illusion. 

4. It is fatalistic. Possibility, as distin- 
guished from necessity on the one hand and 
from impossibility on the other, is an essential 
category of human thinking. For monism, it is 
a pure illusion; for whatever is is necessary, 
and aught else is impossible, if the world be 
such a unit of fact as monists pretend. 

Our sense of ‘freedom’ supposes that some 
things at least are decided here and now, that 
the passing moment may contain some nov- 
elty, be an original starting-point of events, 
and not merely transmit a push from elsewhere. 
We imagine that in some respects at least the 
future may not be co-implicated with the past, 
but may be really addable to it, and indeed 

139 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 


addable in one shape or another, so that the 
next turn in events can at any given moment 
genuinely be ambiguous, i. e., possibly this, 
but also possibly that. 

Monism rules out this whole conception of 
possibles, so native to our common-sense. The 
future and the past are linked, she is obliged 
to say; there can be no genuine novelty any- 
where, for to suppose that the universe has a 
constitution simply additive, with nothing to 
link things together save what the words 
‘plus,’ ‘with,’ or ‘and’ stand for, is repugnant 
to our reason. 

Pluralism, on the other hand, taking per- 
ceptual experience at its face-value, is free from 
all these difficulties. It protests against work- 
ing our ideas in a vacuum made of conceptual 
abstractions. Some parts of our world, it ad- 
mits, cannot exist out of their wholes; but 

The pin- others, it says, can. To some extent 
ralistic 

theory the world seems genuinely additive: 
it may really be so. We cannot explain con- 
ceptually how genuine novelties can come ; but 
if one did come we could experience that it came. 

140 


THE ONE AND THE MANY 


We do, in fact, experience perceptual novelties 
all the while. Our perceptual experience over- 
laps our conceptual reason : the that transcends 
the why. So the common-sense view of life, as 
something really dramatic, with work done, 
and things decided here and now, is acceptable 
to pluralism. ‘Free will’ means nothing but 
real novelty; so pluralism accepts the notion 
of free will. 

But pluralism, accepting a universe unfin- 
ished, with doors and windows open to possi- 
bilities uncontrollable in advance, gives us less 
religious certainty than monism, with its abso- 
lutely closed-in world. It is true that monism’s 
religious certainty is not rationally based, but 
is only a faith that ‘sees the All-Good in the 
All-Real.’ In point of fact, however, monism 
is usually willing to exert this optimistic faith : 
its world is certain to be saved, yes, is saved 
already, unconditionally and from eternity, 
in spite of all the phenomenal appearances of 
risk . 1 

1 For an eloquent expression of the monistic position, from the re- 
ligious point of view, read J. Royce: The World, and the Individual, vol. 
ii, lectures 8, 9, 10. 


141 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 


Its de- 
fects 


A world working out an uncertain destiny, 
as the phenomenal world appears 
to be doing, is an intolerable idea 
to the rationalistic mind. 

Pluralism, on the other hand, is neither 
optimistic nor pessimistic, but melioristic, 
rather. The world, it thinks, may be saved, 
on condition that its parts shall do their best. 
But shipwreck in detail, or even on the whole, 
is among the open possibilities. 

There is thus a practical lack of balance 
about pluralism, which contrasts with mon- 
ism’s peace of mind. The one is a more moral, 
the other a more religious view; and different 
men usually let this sort of consideration deter- 
mine their belief. 1 

So far I have sought only to show the respect- 
ive implications of the rival doctrines without 
its ad- dogmatically deciding which is the 
vantages more true. It is obvious that plural- 
ism has three great advantages: — 

1. It is more ‘scientific,’ in that it insists 


1 See, as to this religious difference, the closing lecture in W. James’s 
Pragmatism. 


142 


THE ONE AND THE MANY 


that when oneness is predicated, it shall mean 
definitely ascertainable conjunctive forms. 
With these the disjunctions ascertainable 
among things are exactly on a par. The two 
are co-ordinate aspects of reality. To make 
the conjunctions more vital and primordial 
than the separations, monism has to abandon 
verifiable experience and proclaim a unity that 
is indescribable. 

2. It agrees more with the moral and dra- 
matic expressiveness of life. 

3. It is not obliged to stand for any particu- 
lar amount of plurality, for it triumphs over 
monism if the smallest morsel of disconnected- 
ness is once found undeniably to exist. ‘Ever 
not quite’ is all it says to monism; while mon- 
ism is obliged to prove that what pluralism 
asserts can in no amount whatever possibly be 
true — an infinitely harder task. 

The advantages of monism, in turn, are its 
natural affinity with a certain kind of reli- 
gious faith, and the peculiar emotional value 
of the conception that the world is a unitary 
fact. 


143 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 


So far lias our use of the pragmatic rule 
brought us towards understanding this di- 
lemma. The reader will by this time feel for 
himself the essential practical difference which 
it involves. The word ‘absence’ seems to in- 
dicate it. The monistic principle implies that 
nothing that is can in any way whatever be 
absent from anything else that is. The plural- 
istic principle, on the other hand, is quite com- 
patible with some things being absent from 
operations in which other things find them- 
selves singly or collectively engaged. Which 
things are absent from which other things, and 
when, — these of course are questions which a 
pluralistic philosophy can settle only by an 
exact study of details. The past, the present, 
and the future in perception, for example, are 
absent from one another, while in imagination 
they are present or absent as the case may be. 
If the time-content of the world be not one 
monistic block of being, if some part, at least, 
of the future, is added to the past without be- 
ing virtually one therewith, or implicitly con- 
tained therein, then it is absent really as well 


THE ONE AND THE MANY 


as phenomenally and may be called an abso- 
lute novelty in the world’s history in so far 
forth. 

Towards this issue, of the reality or unreal- 
ity of the novelty that appears, the pr agmatic 
Monism, difference between monism and plu- 
andnov™’ ralism seems to converge. That we 
elty ourselves may be authors of genuine 

novelty is the thesis of the doctrine of free-will. 
That genuine novelties can occur means that 
from the point of view of what is already given, 
what comes may have to be treated as a matter 
of chance. We are led thus to ask the question : 
In what manner does new being come? Is it 
through and through the consequence of older 
being or is it matter of chance so far as older 
being goes? — which is the same thing as 
asking: Is it original, in the strict sense of 
the word? 

We connect again here with what was said 
at the end of Chapter III. We there agreed 
that being is a datum or gift and has to be 
begged by the philosopher; but we left the 
question open as to whether he must beg it all 

145 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 


at once or beg it bit by bit or in instalments. 
The latter is the more consistently empiricist 
view, and I shall begin to defend it in the chap- 
ter that follows. 


CHAPTER IX 


THE PROBLEM OF NOVELTY 

The impotence to explain being which we 
have attributed to all philosophers is, it will 
be recollected, a conceptual impotence. It is 
when thinking abstractly of the whole of being 
at once, as it confronts us ready-made, that 
we feel our powerlessness so acutely. Possibly, 
if we followed the empiricist method, consider- 
ing the parts rather than the whole, and im- 
agining ourselves inside of them perceptually, 
the subject might defy us less provokingly. 
We are thus brought back to the problem with 
which Chapter VII left off. When perceptible 
amounts of new phenomenal being come to 
birth, must we hold them to be in all points 
predetermined and necessary outgrowths of 
the being already there, or shall we rather 
admit the possibility that originality may thus 
instil itself into reality? 

If we take concrete perceptual experience, 
the question can be answered in only one way. 
‘The same returns not, save to bring the dif- 

147 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 


ferent.’ Time keeps budding into new mo- 
ments, every one of which presents a content 

Percept- which in its individuality never was 
ual nov- 
elty before and will never be again. Of 

no concrete bit of experience was an exact du- 
plicate ever framed. ‘My youth,’ writes Del- 
boeuf, ‘has it not taken flight, carrying away 
with it love, illusion, poetry, and freedom from 
care, and leaving with me instead science, aus- 
tere always, often sad and morose, which some- 
times I would willingly forget, which repeats to 
me hour by hour its grave lessons, or chills me 
by its threats? Will time, which untiringly piles 
deaths on births, and births on deaths, ever re- 
make an Aristotle or an Archimedes, a Newton 
or a Descartes? Can our earth ever cover itself 
again with those gigantic ferns, those immense 
equisetaceans, in the midst of which the same 
antediluvian monsters will crawl and wallow 
as they did of yore? ... No, what has been 
will not, cannot, be again. Time moves on 
with an unfaltering tread, and never strikes 
twice an identical hour. The instants of which 
the existence of the world is composed are all 

148 


THE PROBLEM OF NOVELTY 


dissimilar, — and whatever may be done, some- 
thing remains that can never be reversed .’ 1 
The everlasting coming of concrete novelty 
into being is so obvious that the rationalizing 
intellect, bent ever on explaining what is by 
what was, and having no logical principle but 
identity to explain by, treats the perceptual 
flux as a phenomenal illusion, resulting from the 
unceasing re-combination in new forms of mix- 
ture, of unalterable elements, coeval with the 

Science world. These elements are supposed 
and 

novelty to be the only real beings; and, for 
the intellect once grasped by the vision of them, 
there can be nothing genuinely new under the 
sun. The world’s history, according to molecu- 
lar science, signifies only the ‘redistribution’ 
of the unchanged atoms of the primal firemist, 
parting and meeting so as to appear to us spec- 
tators in the infinitely diversified configura- 
tions which we name as processes and things . 2 

1 J. Delbceuf: Revue Pkilosophique, vol. ix, p. 138 (1880). On the 
infinite variety of reality, compare also W. T. Marvin: An Introduction 
to Systematic Philosophy, New York, 1903, pp. 22-30. 

2 The Atomistic philosophy, which has proved so potent a scientific 
instrument of explanation, was first formulated by Democritus, who 

149 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 


So far as physical nature goes few of us ex- 
perience any temptation to postulate real 
novelty. The notion of eternal elements and 
their mixture serves us in so many ways, that 
we adopt unhesitatingly the theory that pri- 
mordial being is inalterable in its attributes as 
well as in its quantity, and that the laws by 
which we describe its habits are uniform in the 
strictest mathematical sense. These are the 
absolute conceptual foundations, we think, 

died 370 b. c. His life overlapped that of Aristotle, who took what on 
the whole may be called a biological view of the world, and for whom 
‘ forms ’ were as real as elements. The conflict of the two modes of ex- 
planation has lasted to our day, for some chemists still defend the 
Aristotelian tradition which the authority of Descartes had inter- 
rupted for so long, and deny our right to say that ‘ water ’ is not a 
simple entity, or that oxygen and hydrogen atoms persist in it un- 
changed. Compare W. Ostwald: Die XJeberwindung des wissensckaft- 
licheii Materialismus (1895), p. 12: ‘The atomistic view assumes that 
when in iron-oxide, for example, all the sensible properties both of 
iron and oxygen have vanished, iron and oxygen are nevertheless 
there but now manifest other properties. We are so used to this as- 
sumption that it is hard for us to feel its oddity, nay, even its ab- 
surdity. When, however, we reflect that all we know of a given kind 
of matter is its properties, we realize that the assertion that the matter 
is still there, but without any of those properties, is not far removed 
from nonsense.’ Compare the same author’s Principles of Inorganic 
Chemistry, English translation, 2d ed. (1904), p. 149 f. Also P. 
Duhem: ‘La Notion de Mixte,’ in the Revue de Philosophic, vol. i, p. 
452 ff. (1901). — The whole notion of the eternal fixity of elements 
is melting away before the new discoveries about radiant matter. See 
for radical statements G. Le Bon: L' Evolution de la Matiere. 

150 


THE PROBLEM OF NOVELTY 

spread beneath the surface of perceptual vari- 
ety. It is when we come to human lives, that 

Personal our point of view changes. It is hard 
experience ^ j ma gj ne ‘really’ our own. 

novelty subjective experiences are only mo- 
lecular arrangements, even though the mole- 
cules be conceived as beings of a psychic kind. 
A material fact may indeed be different from 
what we feel it to be, but what sense is there in 
saying that a feeling, which has no other na- 
ture than to be felt, is not as it is felt? Psycho- 
logically considered, our experiences resist con- 
ceptual reduction, and our fields of conscious- 
ness, taken simply as such, remain just what 
they appear, even though facts of a molecular 
order should prove to be the signals of the 
appearance. Biography is the concrete form 
in which all that is is immediately given; the 
perceptual flux is the authentic stuff of each of 
our biographies, and yields a perfect efferves- 
cence of novelty all the time. New men and 
women, books, accidents, events, inventions, 
enterprises, burst unceasingly upon the world. 
It is vain to resolve these into ancient ele- 

151 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

ments, or to say that they belong to ancient 
kinds, so long as no one of them in its full indi- 
viduality ever was here before or will ever come 
again. Men of science and philosophy, the 
moment they forget their theoretic abstrac- 
tions, live in their biographies as much as any 
one else, and believe as naively that fact even 
now is making, and that they themselves, by 
doing ‘original work,’ help to determine what 
the future shall become. 

I have already compared the live or percept- 
ual order with the conceptual order from this 
point of view. Conception knows no way of 
explaining save by deducing the identical from 
the identical, so if the world is to be concept- 
ually rationalized no novelty can really come. 
This is one of the traits in that general bank- 
ruptcy of conceptualism, which I enumerated 
in Chapter V — conceptualism can name 
change and growth, but can translate them 
into no terms of its own, and is forced to con- 
tradict the indestructible sense of life within 
us by denying that reality grows. 

It may seem to the youthful student a rather 
152 


THE PROBLEM OF NOVELTY 

‘far cry’ from the question of the possibility 
of novelty to the ‘problem of the infinite,’ but 
in the history of speculation, the two problems 
have been connected. Novelty seems to vio- 
late continuity; continuity seems to involve 
Novelty ‘infinitely’ shaded gradation; infin- 

and the 

infinite ity connects with number; and num- 
ber with fact in general — for facts have to 
be numbered. It has thus come to pass that 
the nonexistence of an infinite number has 
been held to necessitate the finite character 
of the constitution of fact ; and along with this 
its discontinuous genesis, or, in other words, 
its coming into being by discrete increments 
of novelty however small. 

Thus we find the problem of the infinite 
already lying across our path. It will be better 
at this point to interrupt our discussion of the 
more enveloping question of novelty at large, 
and to get the minor problem out of our way 
first. I turn then to the problem of the infinite. 


CHAPTER X 


NOVELTY AND THE INFINITE — THE 
CONCEPTUAL VIEW 1 

The problem is as to which is the more rational 
supposition, that of continuous or that of dis- 
continuous additions to whatever amount or 
kind of reality already exists. 

On the discontinuity-theory, time, change, 
etc., would grow by finite buds or drops, either 
nothing coming at all, or certain units of 
The dis- amount bursting into being ‘ at a 

continuity- 

theory stroke.’ Every feature of the uni- 
verse would on this view have a finite numer- 
ical constitution. Just as atoms, not half- or 
quarter-atoms are the minimum of matter that 
can be, and every finite amount of matter con- 
tains a finite number of atoms, so any amounts 
of time, space, change, etc., which we might 
assume would be composed of a finite number 
of minimal amounts of time, space, and change. 

Such a discrete composition is what actually 

1 [in the author’s manuscript this chapter and the succeeding chap- 
ters were labelled ‘sub-problems,’ and this chapter was entitled ‘The 
Continuum and the Infinite.’ Ed.] 

154 


NOVELTY AND THE INFINITE 


obtains in our perceptual experience. We 
either perceive nothing, or something already 
there in sensible amount. This fact is what 
in psychology is known as the law of the 
‘threshold.’ Either your experience is of no 
content, of no change, or it is of a perceptible 
amount of content or change. Your acquaint- 
ance with reality grows literally by buds or 
drops of perception. Intellectually and on re- 
flection you can divide these into components, 
but as immediately given, they come totally 
or not at all. 

If, however, we take time and space as con- 
cepts, not as perceptual data, we don’t well 
see how they can have this atomistic constitu- 
tion. For if the drops or atoms are themselves 
without duration or extension it is inconceiv- 
able that by adding any number of them to- 

The con- gether times or spaces should accrue, 
tinuity 

theory If, on the other hand, they are mi- 
nute durations or extensions, it is impossible 
to treat them as real minima. Each temporal 
drop must have a later and an earlier half, each 
spatial unit a right and a left half, and these 

155 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 


halves must themselves have halves, and so on 
ad infinitum, so that with the notion that the 
constitution of things is continuous and not 
discrete, that of a divisibility ad infinitum is 
inseparably bound up. This infinite divisibil- 
ity of some facts, coupled with the infinite 
expansibility of others (space, time, and num- 
ber) has given rise to one of the most obstinate 
of philosophy’s dialectic problems. Let me 
take up, in as simple a way as I am able to, the 
'problem of the infinite. 

There is a pseudo-problem, ‘How can the 
finite know the infinite?’ which has troubled 
some English heads . 1 But one might as well 
make a problem of ‘ How can the fat know the 
lean?’ When we come to treat of knowledge, 
such problems will vanish. The real problem 
of the infinite began with the famous argu- 
ments against motion, of Zeno the Eleatic. 
The school of Pythagoras was pluralistic. 
‘Things are numbers,’ the master had said, 
meaning apparently that reality was made of 

1 In H. Calderwood’s Philosophy of the Infinite one will find the 
subordinate difficulties discussed, with almost no consciousness shown 
of the important ones. 


156 


NOVELTY AND THE INFINITE 


points which one might number . 1 Zeno’s argu- 
ments were meant to show, not that motion 
could not really take place, but that it could 
not truly be conceived as taking place by the 
successive occupancy of points. If a flying 
Zeno , s arrow occupies at each point of time 
paradoxes a determinate point of space, its 
motion becomes nothing but a sum of rests, for 
it exists not, out of any point; and in the point 
it does n’t move. Motion cannot truly occur 
as thus discretely constituted. 

Still better known than the ‘arrow’ is the 
‘Achilles’ paradox. Suppose Achilles to race 
with a tortoise, and to move twice as fast as 
his rival, to whom he gives an inch of head- 
start. By the time he has completed that inch, 
or in other words advanced to the tortoise’s 
starting point, the tortoise is half an inch 
ahead of him. While Achilles is traversing 
that half inch, the tortoise is traversing a 
quarter of an inch, etc. So that the successive 
points occupied by the runners simultane- 

1 I follow here J. Burnet: Early Greek Philosophers (the chapter on 
the Pythagoreans), and Paul Tannery: ‘Le concept scientifique du 
continu ’ in the Revue Philosophique, xx, 385. 

157 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 


ously form a convergent series of distances 
from the starting point of Achilles. Measured 
in inches, these distances would run as follows : 

1 . i . l , J. ,i JL 

1 + 2 +1 +¥+ 16 • • • • +5 • • • • co 

Zeno now assumes that space must be infinitely 
divisible. But if so, then the number of points 
to be occupied cannot all be enumerated in 
succession, for the series begun above is inter- 
minable. Each time that Achilles gets to the 
tortoise’s last point it is but to find that the 
tortoise has already moved to a further point; 
and although the interval between the points 
quickly grows infinitesimal, it is mathematic- 
ally impossible that the two racers should 
reach any one point at the same moment. If 
Achilles could overtake the tortoise, it would 
be at the end of two inches; and if his speed 
were two inches a second, it would be at the 
end of the first second ; 1 but the argument 
shows that he simply cannot overtake the ani- 
mal. To do so would oblige him to exhaust, 

1 This shows how shallow is that common ‘exposure’ of Zeno’s 
‘sophism,’ which charges it with trying to prove that to overtake the 
tortoise, Achilles would require an infinitely long time. 

158 


NOVELTY AND THE INFINITE 

by traversing one by one, the whole of them, 
a series of points which the law of their forma- 
tion obliges to come never to an end. 

Zeno’s various arguments were meant to 
establish the ‘Eleatic’ doctrine of real being, 
which was monistic. The ‘minima sensibilia’ 
of which space, time, motion, and change con- 
sist for our perception are not real ‘beings/ 
for they subdivide themselves ad infinitum. 
The nature of real being is to be entire or con- 
tinuous. Our perception, being of a hopeless 
‘many/ thus is false. 

Our own mathematicians have meanwhile 
constructed what they regard as an adequate 
continuum, composed of points or numbers. 
When I speak again of that I shall have occa- 
sion to return to the Achilles-fallacy, so called. 
At present I will pass without transition to the 
next great historic attack upon the problem 
of the infinite, which is the section on the ‘An- 
tinomies’ in Kant’s ‘Critique of Pure Reason.’ 

Kant’s views need a few points of prepara- 
tion, as follows:' — 

1. That real or objective existence must be 
159 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 


determinate existence may be regarded as an 
axiom in ontology. We may be dim as to just 


regarding them; but seeing and belief are 
subjective affections, and the stars by them- 
selves, we are sure, exist in definite numbers. 
‘Even the hairs of our head are numbered,’ we 
feel certain, though no man shall ever count 
them. 1 Any existent reality, taken in itself, 
must therefore be countable, and to any group 
of such realities some definite number must be 
applicable. 

2. Kant defines infinity as ‘that which can 
never be completely measured by the succes- 
sive addition of units ’ — in other words, as 
that which defies complete enumeration. 

3. Kant lays it down as axiomatic that if 
anything is ‘given,’ as an existent reality, the 
whole sum of the ‘conditions’ required to ac- 
count for it must similarly be given, or have 
been given. Thus if a cubic yard of space be 

1 Of the origin in our experience of this singularly solid postulate, I 
will say nothing here. 


Kant’s 

antino- 

mies 


how many stars we see in the Pleiades, 
or doubtful whose count to believe 


160 


NOVELTY AND THE INFINITE 


‘given,’ all its parts must equally be given. If 
a certain date in past time be real, then the 
previous dates must also have been real. If an 
effect be given, the whole series of its causes 
must have been given, etc., etc. 

But the ‘conditions’ in these cases defy 
enumeration: the parts of space are less and 
less ad infinitum, times and causes form series 
that are infinitely regressive for our counting, 
and of no such infinite series can a ‘whole’ be 
formed. Any such series has a variable value, 
for the number of its terms is indefinite; where- 
as the conditions under consideration ought, 
if the ‘whole sum of them’ be really given, to 
exist (by the principle, 1, above) in fixed numer- 
ical amount. 1 

1 The contradiction between the infinity in the form of the condi- 
tions, and the numerical determinateness implied in the fact of them, 
was ascribed by Kant to the ‘ antinomic ’ form of our experience. His 
solution of the puzzle was by the way of ‘idealism,’ and is one of the 
prettiest strokes in his philosophy. Since the conditions cannot exist 
in the shape of a totalized amount, it must be, he says, that they do 
not exist independently or an sick, but only as phenomena, or for us. 
Indefiniteness of amount is not incompatible with merely phenomenal 
existence. Actual phenomena, whether conditioned or conditioning, 
are there for us only in finite amount, as given to perception at any 
given moment; and the infinite form of them means only that we can 
go on perceiving, conceiving or imagining more and more about them, 

161 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 


Such was the form of the puzzle of the in- 
finite, as Kant propounded it. The reader will 
observe a bad ambiguity in the statement. 
When he speaks of the ‘ absolute totality of the 
synthesis ’ of the conditions, the words suggest 
that a completed collection of them must exist 
or have existed. When we hear that ‘the whole 
sum of them must be given,’ we interpret it to 
mean that they must be given in the form of a 
whole sum, whereas all that the logical situa- 
tion requires is that no one of them should he 
lacking , an entirely different demand, and one 
that can be gratified as well in an infinitely 
growing as in a terminated series. The same 
Ambigu- things can always be taken either 
Kant’s collectively or distributively, can be 

statement talked of either as ‘all,’ or as ‘each,’ 
of the 

problem or as ‘any.’ Either statement can be 
applied equally well to what exists in finite 


world without end. It does not mean that what we go on thus to re- 
present shall have been there already by itself, apart from our acts of 
representation. Experience, for idealism, thus falls into two parts, a 
phenomenal given part which is finite, and a conditioning infinite part 
which is not given, but only possible to experience hereafter. Kant 
distinguishes this second part, as only aufgegeben (or set to us as a 
task), from the first part as gegeben (or already extant). 

162 


NOVELTY AND THE INFINITE 

number; and ‘all that is there’ will be covered 
both times. But things which appear under 
the form of endless series can be talked of only 
distributively, if we wish to leave none of them 
out. When we say that ‘ any,’ ‘ each,’ or ‘ every ’ 
one of Kant’s conditions must be fulfilled, we 
are therefore on impeccable ground, even 
though the conditions should form a series as 
endless as that of the whole numbers, to which 
we are forever able to add one. But if we say 
that ‘all’ must be fulfilled, and imagine ‘all’ 
to signify a sum harvested and gathered-in, 
and represented by a number, we not only 
make a requirement utterly uncalled for by the 
logic of the situation, but we create puzzles and 
incomprehensibilities that otherwise would not 
exist, and that may require, to get rid of them 
again, hypotheses as violent as Kant’s ideal- 
ism. 

In the works of Charles Renouvier, the 
strongest philosopher of France during the 
second half of the nineteenth century, the 
problem of the infinite again played a pivotal 
part. Starting from the principle of the nu- 

163 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 


merical determinateness of reality (supra, page 
160) — the ‘principe du nombre,’ as he called 
it — and recognizing that the series of num- 
bers 1, 2, 3, 4, . . . etc., leads to no final ‘in- 
finite’ number, he concluded that such reali- 


soiution and causes, steps of change and parts 
of matter, must needs exist in limited amount. 
This made of him a radical pluralist. Better, 
he said, admit that being gives itself to us ab- 
ruptly, that there are first beginnings, abso- 
lute numbers, and definite cessations, however 
intellectually opaque to us they may seem to 
be, than try to rationalize all this arbitrariness 
of fact by working-in explanatory conditions 
which would involve in every case the self- 
contradiction of things being paid-in and com- 
pleted, although they are infinite in formal 
composition. 

With these principles, Renouvier could be- 
lieve in absolute novelties, unmeditated be- 


noveity acts of faith. Fact, for him, over- 
lapped ; conceptual explanation fell short ; real- 

164 


Renou- 

vier’s 


ties as present beings, past events 


His solu- 
tion favors 


ginnings, gifts, chance, freedom, and 


NOVELTY AND THE INFINITE 


ity must in the end be begged piecemeal, not 
everlastingly deduced from other reality. This, 
the empiricist, as distinguished from the ra- 
tionalist view, is the hypothesis set forth at the 
end of our last chapter . 1 

1 I think that Renouvier made mistakes, and I find his whole philo- 
sophic manner and apparatus too scholastic. But he was one of the 
greatest of philosophic characters, and but for the decisive impression 
made on me in the seventies by his masterly advocacy of pluralism, I 
might never have got free from the monistic superstition under which 
I had grown up. The present volume, in short, might never have been 
written. This is why, feeling endlessly thankful as I do, I dedicate this 
text-book to the great Renouvier’s memory. Renouvier’s works make 
a very long list. The fundamental one is the Essais de Critique GbiSrale 
(first edition, 1854-1864, is in four, second edition, 1875, in six vol- 
umes). Of his latest opinions Le Personnalisme (1903) gives perhaps 
the most manageable account; while the last chapter of his Esquisse 
d’une Classification des Systemes (entitled ‘Comment je suis arrive a 
ces conclusions’) is an autobiographic sketch of his dealings with the 
problem of the infinite. Derniers entretiens, dictated while dying, at 
the age of eighty-eight, is a most impressive document, coming as if 
from a man out of Plutarch. 


CHAPTER XI 1 


NOVELTY AND THE INFINITE — THE 
PERCEPTUAL VIEW 

Kant’s and Renouvier’s dealings with the in- 
finite are fine examples of the way in which 
philosophers have always been wont to infer 
matters of fact from conceptual considerations. 
Real novelty would be a matter of fact ; and so 
would be the idealistic constitution of experi- 
ence ; 2 but Kant and Renouvier deduce these 
facts from the purely logical impossibility of 
an infinite number of conditions getting com- 
pleted. It seems a very short cut to truth; but 
if the logic holds firm, it may be a fair cut , 3 
and the possibility obliges us to scrutinize the 
situation with increasing care. Proceeding so 

1 [This chapter was not indicated as a separate chapter in the manu- 
script. Ed.] 

2 For an account of idealism the reader is referred to chapter below. 
[Never written. Ed.] 

3 Let me now say that we shall ourselves conclude that change 
completed by steps infinite in number is inadmissible. This is hardly 
inferring fact from conceptual considerations, it is only concluding that 
a certain conceptual hypothesis regarding the fact of change will not 
work satisfactorily. The field is thus open for any other hypothesis; 
and the one which we shall adopt is simply that which the face of per- 
ceptual experience suggests. 


166 


NOVELTY AND THE INFINITE 


to do, we immediately find that in the class of 
infinitely conditioned things, we must distin- 
guish two sub-classes, as follows: — 

1. Things conceived as standing, like space, 
past time, existing beings. 

2. Things conceived as growing, like motion, 
change, activity. 

In the standing class there seems to be no 
valid objection to admitting both real exist- 
The stand- ence, and a numerical copiousness de- 
manding infinity for its description. 
If, for instance, we consider the stars, and 
assume the number of them to be infinite, we 
need only suppose that to each several term of 
the endless series 1, 2, 3, 4, ... n ... , there cor- 
responds one star. The numbers, growing end- 
lessly, would then never exceed the stars stand- 
ing there to receive them. Each number would 
find its own star waiting from eternity to be 
numbered; and this in infinitum, some star 
that ever was, matching each number that shall 
be used. As there is no ‘ all ’ to the numbers so 
there need be none to the stars. One cannot 
well see how the existence of each star should 

167 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 


oblige the whole class ‘ star ’ to be of one num- 
ber rather than of another, or require it to be 
of any terminated number. What I say here 
of stars applies to the component parts of 
space and matter, and to those of past time . 1 

So long as we keep taking such facts piece- 
meal, and talk of them distributively as ‘any’ 

itsprag- or ‘each,’ the existence of them in 

matte 

definition infinite form offers no logical diffi- 
culty. But there is a psychological tendency to 
slip from the distributive to the collective way 
of talking, and this produces a sort of mental 
flicker and dazzle out of which the dialectic 
difficulties emerge. ‘If each condition be there,’ 
— we say, ‘ then all are there, for there cannot 


1 Past time may offer difficulty to the student as it has to better 
men! It has terminated in the present moment, paid itself out and 
made an ‘amount.’ But this amount can be counted in both directions; 
and in both, one may think it ought to give the same result. If, when 
counted forward, it came to an end in the present, then when counted 
backward, it must, we are told, come to a like end in the past. It must 
have had a beginning, therefore, and its amount must be finite. The 
sophism here is gross, and amounts to saying that what has one bound 
must have two. The ‘end ’ of the forward counting is the ‘beginning ’ 
of the backward counting, and is the only beginning logically implied. 
The ending of a series in no way prejudices the question whether it 
were beginningless or not; and this applies as well to tracts of time as 
to the abstract regression which ‘ negative ’ numbers form. 

168 


NOVELTY AND THE INFINITE 

be eaches that do not make an all.’ Rightly 
taken, the phrase ‘all are there,’ means only 
that ‘not one is absent.’ But in the mouths of 
most people, it surreptitiously foists in the 
wholly irrelevant notion of a bounded total. 

There are other similar confusions. ‘How,’ 
it may be asked, in Locke’s words, can a 
‘growing measure’ fail to overtake a ‘standing 
bulk ’? And standing existence must some time 
be overtaken by a growing number-series, 
must be finished or finite in its numerical 
determination. But this again foists in the 
notion of a bound. What is given as ‘standing’ 
in the cases under review is not a ‘bulk,’ but 
each star, atom, past date or what not; and to 
call these eaches a ‘bulk,’ is to beg the very 
point at issue. But probably the real reason 
why we object to a standing infinity is the 
reason that made Hegel speak of it as the 
‘ false ’ infinite. It is that the vertiginous chase 
after ever more space, ever more past time, 
ever more subdivision, seems endlessly stupid. 
What need is there, what use is there, for so 
much? Not that any amount of anything is 

169 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 


absolutely too big to be ; but that some amounts 
are too big for our imagination to wish to ca- 
ress them. So we fall back with a feeling of 
relief on some form or other of the finitist hy- 
pothesis . 1 

If now we turn from static to growing forms 
of being, we find ourselves confronted by much 
more serious difficulties. Zeno’s and Kant’s 
dialectic holds good wherever, before an end 
The grow- can foe reached, a succession of terms, 

ing in- 
finite endless by definition, must needs have 

been successively counted out. This is the 
case with every process of change, however 
small; with every event which we conceive as 
unrolling itself continuously. What is contin- 
uous must be divisible ad infinitum ; and from 
division to division here you cannot proceed 
by addition (or by what Kant calls the succes- 

1 The reader will note how emphatically in all this discussion, I am 
insisting on the distributive or piecemeal point of view. The distrib- 
utive is identical with the pluralistic, as the collective is with the 
monistic conception. We shall, I think, perceive more and more clearly 
as this book proceeds, that piecem eal existence is independent of complete 
collectibility, and that some facts, at any rate, exist only distributively, 
or in form of a set of eaches which (even if in infinite number) need not 
in any intelligible sense either experience themselves, or get experi- 
enced by anything else, as members of an All. 

170 


NOVELTY AND THE INFINITE 


sive synthesis of units) and touch a farther 
limit. You can indeed define what the limit 
ought to be, but you cannot reach it by this 
process. That Achilles should occupy in suc- 
cession ‘all’ the points in a single continuous 
inch of space, is as inadmissible a conception 
as that he should count the series of whole num- 
bers 1, 2, 3, 4, etc., to infinity and reach an end. 
The terms are not ‘enumerable’ in that order; 
and the order it is that makes the whole diffi- 
culty. An infinite ‘regression’ like the rear- 
ward perspective of time offers no such con- 
tradiction, for it comes not in that order. Its 
‘end’ is what we start with; and each succes- 
sive note ‘ more ’ which our imagination has to 
add, ad infinitum, is thought of as already hav- 
ing been paid in and not as having yet to be 
paid before the end can be attained. Starting 
with our end, we have to wait for nothing. The 
infinity here is of the ‘ standing ’ variety. It is, 
in the word of Kant’s pun, gegeben, not auf- 
gegeben: in the other case, of a continuous pro- 
cess to be traversed, it is on the contrary auf- 
gegeben: it is a task — not only for our philo- 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 


sophic imagination, but for any real agent who 
might try physically to compass the entire 
performance. Such an agent is bound by logic 
to find always a remainder, something ever 
yet to be paid, like the balance due on a debt 
with even the interest of which we do not 
catch up. 

‘ Infinitum in actu pertransiri nequit,’ said 
scholasticism; and every continuous quantum 
The grow- to gradually traversed is conceived 
as such an infinite. The quickest way 
to avoid the contradiction would 
seem to be to give up that concep- 
tion, and to treat real processes of 
change no longer as being continuous, but as 
taking place by finite not infinitesimal steps, 
like the successive drops by which a cask of 
water is filled, when whole drops fall into it at 
once or nothing. This is the radically pluralist, 
empiricist, or perceptualist position, which I 
characterized in speaking of Renouvier (above, 
pages 164-165). We shall have to end by adopt- 
ing it in principle ourselves, qualifying it so as 
to fit it closely to perceptual experience. 

172 


ing infin- 
ite must 
be treated 
as dis- 
continu- 
ous 


NOVELTY AND THE INFINITE 


Meanwhile we are challenged by a certain 
school of critics who think that what in mathe- 
Objec- matics is called ‘the new infinite’ 
has quashed the old antinomies, and 
who treat anyone whom the notion of a com- 
pleted infinite in any form still bothers, as a 
very naif person. Naif though I am in mathe- 
matics, I must, notwithstanding the dryness of 
the subject, add a word in rebuttal of these 
criticisms, some of which, as repeated by nov- 
ices, tend decidedly towards mystification. 

The ‘new infinite’ and the ‘number-con- 
tinuum’ are outgrowths of a general attempt 
(i) The to accomplish what has been called 

number- 

continuum the ‘ arithmetization ’ (apifyios mean- 
ing number) of all quantity. Certain quanta 
(grades of intensity or other difference, amounts 
of space) have until recently been supposed to 
be immediate data of perceptive sensibility or 
‘intuition’; but philosophical mathematicians 
have now succeeded in getting a conceptual 
equivalent for them in the shape of collections 
of numbers created by interpolation between 
one another indefinitely. We can halve any 

173 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 


line in space, and halve its halves and so on. 
But between the cuts thus made and numbered, 
room is left for infinite others created by using 
3 as a divisor, for infinite others still by using 
5, 7, etc., until all possible ‘rational’ divisions 
of the line shall have been made. Between 
these it is now shown that interpolation of cuts 
numbered ‘irrationally’ is still possible ad 
infinitum, and that with these the line at last 
gets filled full, its continuity now being wholly 
translated into these numbered cuts, and their 
number being infinite. ‘Of the celebrated for- 
mula that continuity means “ unity in multi- 
plicity,” the multiplicity alone subsists, the 
unity disappears,’ 1 — as indeed it does in all 
conceptual translations — and the original in- 
tuition of the line’s extent gets treated, from 
the mathematical point of view, as a ‘mass of 
uncriticized prejudice’ by Russell, or sneered 
at by Cantor as a ‘ kind of religious dogma.’ 2 
So much for the number-continuum. As for 
‘the new infinite’: that means only a new defi- 

1 H. Poincare: La science et Vhypothese, p. 30. 

1 B. Russell: The Philosophy of Mathematics, i, 260, 287. 

174 


NOVELTY AND THE INFINITE 


nition of infinity. If we compare the indefi- 
nitely-growing number-series, 1, 2, 3, 4, n, 

in its entirety, with any component part of 

( 2 ) The it, like 4 even ’ numbers ‘prime 5 num- 
‘ new 

infinite’ bers, or ‘square’ numbers, we are 
confronted with a paradox. No one of the parts, 
thus named, of the number-series, is equal to 
the whole collectively taken; yet any one of 
them is ‘ similar ’ to the whole, in the sense that 
you can set up a one-to-one relation between 
each of its elements and each element of the 
whole, so that part and whole prove to be of 
what logicians call the same ‘class,’ numeri- 
cally. Thus, in spite of the fact that even num- 
bers, prime numbers, and square numbers are 
much fewer and rarer than numbers in general, 
and only form a part of numbers uberliau'pt 
they appear to be equally copious for purposes 
of counting. The terms of each such partial 
series can be numbered by using the natural 
integers in succession. There is, for instance, a 
first prime, a second prime, etc., ad infinitum; 
and queerer-sounding still, since every integer, 
odd or even, can be doubled, it would seem that 

175 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 


the even numbers thus produced cannot in the 
nature of things be less multitudinous than 
that series of both odd and even numbers of 
which the whole natural series consists. 

These paradoxical consequences result, as 
one sees immediately, from the fact that the 
The new infinity of the number-series is of the 
paradoxi- growing variety (above, page 170). 

They were long treated as a reductio 
ad absurdum of the notion that such a variable 
series spells infinity in act, or can ever be 
translated into standing or collective form. 1 
But contemporary mathematicians have taken 
the bull by the horns. Instead of treating such 
paradoxical properties of indefinitely growing 
series as reductiones ad absurdum , they have 
turned them into the proper definition of in- 
finite classes of things. Any class is now called 

1 The fact that, taken distributively, or paired each to each, the 
terms in one endlessly growing series should be made a match for those 
in another (or ‘similar’ to them) is quite compatible with the two 
series being collectively of vastly unequal amounts. You need only 
make the steps of difference, or distances, between the terms much 
longer in one series than in the other, to get numerically similar multi- 
tudes, with greatly unequal magnitudes of content. Moreover the 
moment either series should stop growing, the ‘similarity ’ would cease 
to exist. 


176 


NOVELTY AND THE INFINITE 


infinite if its parts are numerically similar to 
itself. If its parts are numerically dissimilar, it 
is finite.. This definition now separates the 
conception of the class of finite from that of 
infinite objects. 

Next, certain concepts, called ‘transfinite 
numbers,’ are now created by definition. They 
‘ Trans- are decreed to belong to the infinite 

finite 

numbers* class, and yet not to be formed by 
adding one to one ad infinitum, but rather to 
be postulated outright as coming after each and 
all of the numbers formed by such addition . 1 
Cantor gives the name of ‘Omega’ to the low- 
est of these possible transfinite numbers. It 
would, for instance, be the number of the point 
at which Achilles overtakes the tortoise — if 
he does overtake him — by exhausting all the 
intervening points successively. Or it would 
be the number of the stars, in case their count- 

1 The class of all numbers that ‘ come before the first transfinite ’ is a 
definitely limited conception, provided we take the numbers as eaches 
or anys, for then any one and every of them will have by definition to 
come before the transfinite number comes — even though they form no 
whole and there be no last one of them, and though the transfinite have 
no immediate predecessor. The transfinite is, in a word, not an ordinal 
conception, at least it does not continue the order of entire numbers. 

177 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 


ing could not terminate. Or again it would be 
the number of miles away at which parallel lines 
meet — if they do meet. It is, in short, a 
‘ limit ’ to the whole class of numbers that grow 
one by one, and like other limits, it proves a 
useful conceptual bridge for passing us from 
one range of facts to another. 

The first sort of fact we pass to with its 

help is the number of the number-continuum 

Their uses or point-continuum described above 
and de- . . 

fects (page 173) as generated by infinitely 
repeated subdivision. The making of the subdi- 
visions is an infinitely growing process ; but the 
number of subdivisions that can be made has 
for its limit the transfinite number Omega just 
imagined and defined ; thus is a growing assimi- 
lated to a standing multitude; thus is a number 
that is variable practically equated (by the 
process of passing to the limit) with one that 
is fixed; thus do we circumvent the law of in- 
definite addition, or division which previously 
was the only way in which infinity was con- 
structable, and reach a constant infinite at a 
bound. This infinite number may now be sub- 

178 


NOVELTY AND THE INFINITE 


stituted for any continuous finite quantum, 
however small the latter may perceptually ap- 
pear to be. 

When I spoke of my ‘mystification,’ just 
now, I had partly in mind the contemptuous 
way in which some enthusiasts for the ‘new 
infinite ’ treat those who still cling to the super- 
stition that ‘the whole is greater than the 
part.’ Because any point whatever in an im- 
aginary inch is now conceivable as being 
matched by some point in a quarter-inch or 
half-inch, this numerical ‘similarity’ of the 
different quanta, taken point-wise, is treated as 
if it signified that half-inches, quarter-inches, 
and inches are mathematically identical things 
anyhow, and that their differences are facts 
which we may scientifically neglect. I may 
misunderstand the newest expounders of 
Zeno’s famous ‘sophism,’ but what they say 
seems to me virtually to be equivalent to this. 

Mr. Bertrand Russell (whom I do not accuse 
of mystification, for Heaven knows he tries to 
make things clear !) treats the Achilles-puzzle 
as if the difficulty lay only in seeing how the 

179 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 


paths traversed by the two runners (measured 

after the race is run, and assumed then to con- 

Russeii’s sist of nothing but points of position 

solution • • i . , 

of Zeno’s coincident with points upon a com- 

paradox mon scale of time) should have the 

by their ' 

means same time-measure if they be not 
themselves of the same length. But the two 
paths are of different lengths ; for owing to the 
tortoise’s head-start, the tortoise’s path is only 
a part of the path of Achilles. How, then, if 
time-points are to be the medium of measure- 
ment, can the longer path not take the longer 
time? 

The remedy, for Mr. Russell, if I rightly 
understand him, lies in noting that the sets of 
points in question are conceived as being in- 
finitely numerous in both paths, and that 
where infinite multitudes are in question, to 
say that the whole is greater than the part is 
false. For each and every point traversed by 
the tortoise there is one point traversed by 
Achilles, at the corresponding point of time; 
and the exact correspondence, point by point, 
of either one of the three sets of points with 

180 


NOVELTY AND THE INFINITE 


both the others, makes of them similar and 
equally copious sets from the numerical point 
of view. There is thus no recurrent ‘remainder ’ 
of the tortoise’s head-start with which Achilles 
cannot catch up, which he can reduce indefin- 
itely, but cannot annul. The books balance to 
the end. The last point in Achilles’s path, the 
last point in the tortoise’s, and the last time- 
instant in the race are terms which mathe- 
matically coincide. With this, which seems to 
be Mr. Russell’s way of analyzing the situa- 
tion, the puzzle is supposed to disappear . 1 

It seems to me however that Mr. Russell’s 
statements dodge the real difficulty, which 
The s °- concerns the ‘growing’ variety of 

lution 

criticized infinity exclusively, and not the 
‘standing’ variety, which is all that he envis- 
ages when he assumes the race already to have 
been run and thinks that the only problem 
that remains is that of numerically equating 
the paths. The real difficulty may almost be 

1 Mr. Russell’s own statements of the puzzle as well as of the remedy 
are too technical to be followed verbatim in a book like this. As he 
finds it necessary to paraphrase the puzzle, so I find it convenient to 
paraphrase him, sincerely hoping that no injustice has been done. 

181 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

called physical, for it attends the process of 
formation of the paths. Moreover, two paths 
are not needed — that of either runner alone, 
or even the lapse of empty time, involves the 
difficulty, which is that of touching a goal 
when an interval needing to be traversed first 
keeps permanently reproducing itself and get- 
ting in your way. Of course the same quantum 
can be produced in various manners. This page 
which I am now painfully writing, letter after 
letter, will be printed at a single stroke. God, 
as the orthodox believe, created the space- 
continuum, with its infinite parts already 
standing in it, by an instantaneous fiat. Past 
time now stands in infinite perspective, and 
may conceivably have been created so, as 
Kant imagined, for our retrospection only, and 
all at once. ‘ Omega ’ was created by a single 
decree, a single act of definition in Prof. Can- 
tor’s mind. But whoso actually traverses a con- 
tinuum, can do so by no process continuous in 
the mathematical sense. Be it short or long, 
each point must be occupied in its due order of 
succession; and if the points are necessarily 

182 


NOVELTY AND THE INFINITE 


infinite, their end cannot be reached, for the 
‘remainder,’ in this kind of process, is just 
what one cannot ‘neglect.’ ‘Enumeration’ is, 
in short, the sole possible method of occupa- 
tion of the series of positions implied in the 
famous race; and when Mr. Russell solves the 
puzzle by saying as he does, that ‘the defini- 
tion of whole and part without enumeration is 
the key to the whole mystery ,’ 1 he seems to me 
deliberately to throw away his case . 2 

1 The Philosophy of Mathematics, i, 361. — Mr. Russell gives a 
Tristram Shandy paradox as a counterpart to the Achilles. Since it 
took T. S. (according to Sterne) two years to write the history of the 
first two days of his life, common sense would conclude that at that rate 
the life never could be written. But Mr. Russell proves the contrary; 
for, as days and years have no last term, and the nth day is written in 
the nth year, any assigned day will be written about, and no part of the 
life remain unwritten. But Mr. Russell’s proof cannot be applied to 
the real world without the physical hypothesis which he expresses by 
saying: ‘If Tristram Shandy lives forever, and does not weary of his 
task.’ In all real cases of continuous change a similarly absurd hypothe- 
sis must be made: the agent of the change must live forever, in the 
sense of outliving an endless set of points of time, and ‘ not wearying ’ 
of his impossible task. 

2 Being almost blind mathematically and logically, I feel considera- 
ble shyness in differing from such superior minds, yet what can one do 
but follow one’s own dim light? The literature of the new infinite is so 
technical that it is impossible to cite details of it in a non-mathemati- 
cal work like this. Students who are interested should consult the 
tables of contents of B. Russell’s Philosophy of Mathematics, of L. 
Couturat’s Infini Mathematique, or his Principes des Mathematiques. 

183 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 


After this disagreeable polemic, I conclude 
that the new infinite need no longer block the 
Conciu- way the empiricist opinion which 
we reached provisionally on page 
172. Irrelevant though they be to facts the 
‘ conditions ’ of which are of the ‘ standing ’ 
sort, the criticisms of Leibnitz, Kant, Cauchy, 
Renouvier, Evellin and others, apply legiti- 
mately to all cases of supposedly continuous 
growth or change. The ‘ conditions ’ here have 
to be fulfilled seriatim; and if the series which 
they form were endless, its limit, if ‘ successive 
synthesis ’ were the only way of reaching it, 
could simply not be reached. Either we must 

A still more rigorous exposition may be found in E. V. Huntington, 
The Continuum as a Type of Order, in the Annals of Mathematics, xoh. 
vi and vii (reprint for sale at publication-office. Harvard University). 
Compare also C. S. Peirce’s paper in the Monist, ii, 537-546, as well as 
the presidential address of E. W. Hobson in the Proceedings of the Lon- 
don Mathematical Society, x ol. xxxv. For more popular discussions see 
J. Royce, The World and the Individual, vol. i, Supplementary Essay; 
Keyser: Journal of Philosophy, etc., i, 29, and Hibbert Journal, vii, 380- 
390; S. Waterton in Aristotelian Soc. Proceedings, 1910; Leighton: 
Philosophical Review, xiii, 497; and finally the tables of contents of H. 
Poincare’s three recent little books. La science et I’hypothese, Paris ; 
The Value of Science (authorized translation by G. B. Halsted), New 
York, 1907 ; Science et Methode, Paris, 1908. The liveliest short at- 
tack which I know upon infinites completed by successive synthesis, 
is that in G. M. Fullerton’s System of Metaphysics, chapter xi. 

184 


NOVELTY AND THE INFINITE 


stomach logical contradiction, therefore, in these 
cases ; or we must admit that the limit is reached 
in these successive cases by finite and perceptible 
units of approach — drops, buds, steps, or what- 
ever we please to term them, of change, coming 
wholly when they do come, or coming not at all. 
Such seems to be the nature of concrete experi- 
ence, which changes always by sensible amounts, 
or stays unchanged. The infinite character we 
find in it is woven into it by our later concep- 
tion indefinitely repeating the act of subdividing 
any given amount supposed. The facts do not 
resist the subsequent conceptual treatment ; but 
we need not believe that the treatment necessa- 


rily reproduces the operation by which they 


were originally brought into existence. 


The antinomy of mathematically continuous 


i. Con- 
ceptual 
transform- 
ation of 
percept- 
ual experi- 
ence turns 
the infinite 
into a 
problem 


growth is thus but one more of those 
many ways in which our conceptual 
transformation of perceptual experi- 
ence makes it less comprehensible 
than ever. That being should im- 
mediately and by finite quantities 


add itself to being, may indeed be something 


185 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 


which an onlooking intellect fails to under- 
stand; but that being should be identified 
with the consummation of an endless chain 
of units (such as ‘points’), no one of which 
contains any amount whatever of the being 
(such as ‘space’) expected to result, this is 
something which our intellect not only fails 
to understand, but which it finds absurd. The 
substitution of ‘ arithmetization ’ for intuition 
thus seems, if taken as a description of reality, 
to be only a partial success. Better accept, 
as Renouvier says, the opaquely given data of 
perception, than concepts inwardly absurd . 1 

1 The point-continuum illustrates beautifully my complaint that 
the intellectualist method turns the flowing into the static and discrete. 
The buds or steps of process which perception accepts as primal gifts 
of being, correspond logically to the ‘ infinitesimals ’ (minutest quanta 
of notion, change or what not) of which the latest mathematics is sup- 
posed to have got rid. Mr. Russell accordingly finds himself obliged, 
just like Zeno, to treat motion as an unreality: ‘ Weierstrass,’ he says, 

‘ by strictly banishing all infinitesimals has at last shown that we live 
in an unchanging world, and that the arrow, at every moment of its 
flight, is truly at rest ’ (op. cit., p. 347). ‘We must entirely reject the 
notion of a state of motion,’ he says elsewhere; ‘motion consists 
merely in the occupation of different places at different times. . . . 
There is no transition from place to place, no consecutive moment, 
or consecutive position, no such thing as velocity except in the sense 
of a real number which is the limit of a certain set of quotients’ (p. 
473). The mathematical ‘continuum,’ so called, becomes thus an 
absolute discontinuum in any physical or experiential sense. Ex- 

186 


NOVELTY AND THE INFINITE 


So much for the ‘problem of the infinite,’ 
and for the interpretation of continuous change 
by the new definition of infinity. We find that 
the picture of a reality changing by steps finite 
in number and discrete, remains quite as ac- 
ceptable to our understanding and as congenial 
to our imagination as before; so, after these 
dry and barren chapters, we take up our main 
topic of inquiry just where we had laid it down. 
Does reality grow by abrupt increments of 

2 it leaves nove ^y> or not? The contrast be- 
thepro- tween discontinuity and continuity 

blem of 

novelty now confronts us in another form, 
where it was rp^ e mathematical definition of con- 
tinuous quantity as ‘that between any two 
elements or terms of which there is another 
term ’ is directly opposed to the more empirical 
or perceptual notion that anything is continu- 
ous when its parts appear as immediate next 
neighbors, with absolutely nothing between. 

tremes meet; and although Russell and Zeno agree in denying per- 
ceptual motion, for the one a pure unity, for the other a pure multi- 
plicity takes its place. It is probable that Russell’s denial of change, 
etc. is meant to apply only to the mathematical world. It would 
be unfair to charge him with writing metaphysics in these passages, 
although he gives no warning that this may not be the case. 

187 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 


Our business lies hereafter with the perceptual 
account, but before we settle definitively to its 
discussion, another classic problem of philoso- 
phy had better be got out of the way. This is 
the ‘problem of causation.’ 


CHAPTER XII 1 


NOVELTY AND CAUSATION — THE 
CONCEPTUAL VIEW 

If reality changes by finite sensible steps, the 
question whether the bits of it that come are 
radically new, remains unsettled still. Remem- 
ber our situation at the end of Chapter III. Be- 
ing uberhaupt or at large, we there found to be 
undeduceable. For our intellect it remains a 
casual and contingent quantum that is simply 
found or begged. May it be begged bit by bit, 
as it adds itself? Or must we beg it only once, 
by assuming it either to be eternal or to have 
come in an instant that co-implicated all the 
The * prin- re st of time? Did or did not ‘the 

ciple of 

causality’ first morning of creation write what 
the last dawn of reckoning shall read’? With 
these questions monism and pluralism stand 
face to face again. The classic obstacle to plu- 
ralism has always been what is known as the 
‘principle of causality.’ This principle has been 

1 [In the author’s manuscript this chapter bore the heading — 
‘ Second Sub-problem — Cause and Effect.’ Ed.] 

189 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 


taken to mean that the effect in some way al- 
ready exists in the cause. If this be so, the 
effect cannot be absolutely novel, and in no 
radical sense can pluralism be true. 

We must therefore review the facts of causa- 
tion. I take them in conceptual translation 
before considering them in perceptual form. The 
first definite inquiry into causes was made by 
Aristotle . 1 

The £ why ’ of anything, he said, is furnished 

by four principles: the material cause of it (as 

Aristotle when bronze makes a statue); the 
on causa- 
tion formal cause (as when the ratio of 

two to one makes an octave); the efficient 

cause (as when a father makes a child) and the 

final cause (as when one exercises for the sake 

of health). Christian philosophy adopted the 

four causes; but what one generally means by 

the cause of anything is its ‘efficient’ cause, 

and in what immediately follows I shall speak 

of that alone. 

An efficient cause is scholastically defined as 

1 Book 2, or book 5, chap, ii of his Metaphysics, or chap, iii of his 
Physics, give what is essential in his views. 

190 


NOVELTY AND CAUSATION 


‘that which produces something else by a real 
activity proceeding from itself.’ This is unques- 
Schoiasti- tionably the view of common sense; 
efficient and scholasticism is only common 
cause sense grown quite articulate. Passing 
over the many classes of efficient cause which 
scholastic philosophy specifies, I will enumer- 
ate three important sub-principles it is sup- 
posed to follow from the above definition. 
Thus: 1. No effect can come into being with- 
out a cause. This may be verbally taken; but 
if, avoiding the word effect, it be taken in 
the sense that nothing can happen without a 
cause, it is the famous ‘principle of causality’ 
which, when combined with the next two prin- 
ciples, is supposed to establish the block-uni- 
verse, and to render the pluralistic hypothesis 
absurd. 

2. The effect is always proportionate to the 
cause, and the cause to the effect. 

3. Whatever is in the effect must in some 
way, whether formally, virtually, or eminently, 
have been also in the cause. (‘Formally’ here 
means that the cause resembles the effect, as 

191 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 


when one motion causes another motion; vir- 
tually means that the cause somehow involves 
that effect, without resembling it, as when an 
artist causes a statue but possesses not himself 
its beauty; ‘eminently’ means that the cause, 
though unlike the effect, is superior to it in 
perfection, as when a man overcomes a lion’s 
strength by greater cunning.) 

Nemo dat quod non habet is the real principle 
from which the causal philosophy flows; and 
the proposition causa cequat ejfectum practi- 
cally sums up the whole of it . 1 

It is plain that each moment of the universe 
must contain all the causes of which the next 
moment contains effects, or to put it with ex- 
treme concision, it is plain that each moment 
in its totality causes the next moment . 2 But 

1 Read for a concise statement of the school-doctrine of causation 
the account in J. Rickaby: General Metaphysics, book 2, chap. iii. I 
omit from my text various subordinate maxims which have played a 
great part in causal philosophy, as ‘ The cause of a cause is the cause 
of its effects’; ‘The same causes produce the same effects’; ‘Causes 
act only when present ’; ‘ A cause must exist before it can act,’ etc. 

2 This notion follows also from the consideration of conditioning cir- 
cumstances being at bottom as indispensable as causes for producing 
effects. ‘The cause, philosophically speaking, is the sum total of the 
conditions positive and negative,’ says J. S. Mill {Logic, 8th edition, i, 

192 


NOVELTY AND CAUSATION 


if the maxim holds firm that quidquid est in 
effectu debet esse prius aliquo modo in causa, it 
follows that the next moment can contain 
nothing genuinely original, and that the nov- 
elty that appears to leak into our lives so un- 
remittingly, must be an illusion, ascribable to 
the shallowness of the perceptual point of view. 

Scholasticism always respected common 
sense, and in this case escaped the frank denial 
of all genuine novelty by the vague qualifica- 
tion ‘aliquo modo.’ This allowed the effect 
also to differ, aliquo modo, from its cause. But 
conceptual necessities have ruled the situation 
and have ended, as usual, by driving nature 
and perception to the wall. A cause and its 
effect are two numerically discrete concepts, 
and yet in some inscrutable way the former 
must ‘produce’ the latter. How can it intel- 
ligibly do so, save by already hiding the latter 
in itself? Numerically two, cause and effect 

383). This is equivalent to the entire state of the universe at the mo- 
ment that precedes the effect. But neither is the ‘effect ’ in that case 
the one fragmentary event which our attention first abstracted under 
that name. It is that fragment, along with all its concomitants — or 
in other words it is the entire state of the universe at the second mo- 
ment desired. 


193 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 


must be generically one, in spite of the per- 
ceptual appearances; and causation changes 
thus from a concretely experienced relation 
between differents into one between similars 
abstractly thought of as more real . 1 

The overthrow of perception by conception 
took a long time to complete itself in this field. 
Occasion- The first step was the theory of ‘oc- 
ahsm casionalism,’ to which Descartes led 
the way by his doctrine that mental and phys- 
ical substance, the one consisting purely of 
thought, the other purely of extension, were 
absolutely dissimilar. If this were so, any such 
causal intercourse as we instinctively perceive 
between mind and body ceased to be rational. 


1 Sir William Hamilton expresses this very compactly: ‘What is the 
law of Causality? Simply this, — that when an object is presented 
phenomenally as commencing, we cannot but suppose that the com- 
plement (i. e. the amount) of existence, which it now contains, has 
previously been; — in other words, that all that we at present know as 
an effect must previously have existed in its causes; though what these 
causes are we may perhaps be altogether unable to surmise.’ (End of 
Lecture 39 of the Metaphysics.) The cause becomes a reason, the effect 
a consequence; and since logical consequence follows only from the 
same to the same, the older vaguer causation-philosophy develops into 
the sharp rationalistic dogma that cause and effect are two names for 
one persistent being, and that if the successive moments of the uni- 
verse be causally connected, no genuine novelty leaks in. 

194 


NOVELTY AND CAUSATION 


For thinkers of that age, ‘ God ’ was the great 
solvent of absurdities. He could get over 
every contradiction. Consequently Descartes’ 
disciples Regis and Cordemoy, and especially 
Geulincx, denied the fact of psychological in- 
teraction altogether. God, according to them, 
immediately caused the changes in our mind 
of which events in our body, and those in our 
body of which events in our mind, appear to be 
the causes, but of which they are in reality only 
the signals or occasions. 

Leibnitz took the next step forward in 
quenching the claim to truth of our percep- 
Leibnitz tions. He freed God from the duty 
of lending all this hourly assistance, by sup- 
posing Him to have decreed on the day of crea- 
tion that the changes in our several minds 
should coincide with those in our several bodies, 
after the manner in which clocks, wound up 
on the same day, thereafter keep time with one 
another. With this ‘pre-established harmony’ 
so-called, the conceptual translation of the 
immediate given, with its never failing result 
of negating both activity and continuity, is 

195 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 


complete. Instead of the dramatic flux of per- 
sonal life, a bare ‘one to one correspondence’ 
between the terms of two causally uncon- 
nected series is set up. God is the sole cause of 
anything, and the cause of everything at once. 
The theory is as monistic as the rationalist 
heart can desire, and of course novelty would 
be impossible if it were true. 

David Hume made the next step in discredit- 
ing common-sense causation. In the chapters 
on ‘the idea of necessary connection’ both in 
his ‘Treatise on Human Nature,’ and in his 
‘Essays,’ he sought for a positive picture of 
the ‘efficacy of the power’ which causes are 
Hume assumed to exert, and failed to find 
it. He shows that neither in the physical nor 
in the mental world can we abstract or isolate 
the ‘ energy ’ transmitted from causes to effects. 
This is as true of perception as it is of imagina- 
tion. ‘All ideas are derived from and represent 
impressions. We never have any impression 
that contains any power or efficacy. We never 
therefore have any idea of power.’ ‘We never 
can by our utmost scrutiny discover anything 

196 


NOVELTY AND CAUSATION 


but one event following another; without being 
able to comprehend any force or power, by 
which the cause operates, or any connection 
between it and its supposed effect. . . . The 
necessary conclusion seems to be that we have 
no idea of connection or power at all, and that 
these words are absolutely without any mean- 
ing, when employed either in philosophical 
reasonings or in common life.’ ‘Nothing is 
more evident than that the mind cannot form 
such an idea of two objects as to conceive any 
connection between them, or comprehend dis- 
tinctly that power or efficacy by which they 
are united.’ 

The pseudo-idea of a connection which we 
have, Hume then goes on to show, is nothing 
but the misinterpretation of a mental custom. 
When we have often experienced the same 
sequence of events, ‘we are carried by habit, 
upon the appearance of the first one, to expect 
its usual attendant, and to believe that it will 
exist. . . . This customary transition of the 
imagination is the sentiment or impression 
from which we form the idea of power or neces- 

197 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 


sary connection. Nothing farther is in the case. 5 
‘A cause is an object precedent and contiguous 
to another, and so united with it that the idea 
of the one determines the idea of the other.’ 

Nothing could be more essentially plural- 
istic than the elements of Hume’s philosophy. 
He makes events rattle against their neighbors 
as drily as if they were dice in a box. He might 
with perfect consistency have believed in real 
novelties, and upheld freewill. But I said 
awhile ago that most empiricists had been half- 
hearted; and Hume was perhaps the most 
half-hearted of the lot. In his essay ‘on liberty 
and necessity,’ he insists that the sequences 
which we experience, though between events 
absolutely disconnected, are yet absolutely 
uniform, and that nothing genuinely new can 
flower out of our lives. 

The reader will recognize in Hume’s famous 
pages a fresh example of the way in which con- 
Criticism ceptual translations always maltreat 
of Hume f ac t. Perceptually or concretely (as 
we shall notice in more detail later) causation 
names the manner in which some fields of con- 

198 


NOVELTY AND CAUSATION 

sciousness introduce other fields. It is but one 
of the forms in which experience appears as a 
continuous flow. Our names show how suc- 
cessfully we can discriminate within the flow. 
But the conceptualist rule is to suppose that 
where there is a separate name there ought to 
be a fact as separate; and Hume, following this 
rule, and finding no such fact corresponding to 
the word ‘power,’ concludes that the word is 
meaningless. By this rule every conjunction 
and preposition in human speech is meaning- 
less — in, on, of, with, but, and, if, are as 
meaningless as for, and because. The truth is 
that neither the elements of fact nor the mean- 
ings of our words are separable as the words 
are. The original form in which fact comes is 
the perceptual durcheinander, holding terms as 
well as relations in solution, or interfused and 
cemented. Our reflective mind abstracts divers 
aspects in the muchness, as a man by looking 
through a tube may limit his attention to one 
part after another of a landscape. But abstrac- 
tion is not insulation; and it no more breaks 
reality than the tube breaks the landscape. 

199 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 


Concepts are notes, views taken on reality , 1 
not pieces of it, as bricks are of a house. Causal 
activity, in short, may play its part in growing 
fact, even though no substantive ‘impression’ 
of it should stand out by itself. Hume’s as- 
sumption that any factor of reality must be 
separable, leads to his preposterous view, that 
no relation can be real. ‘All events,’ he writes, 
‘seem entirely loose and separate. One event 
follows another, but we never can observe any 
tie between them. They seem conjoined, but 
never connected.’ Nothing, in short, belongs 
with anything else. Thus does the intellectual- 
ist method pulverize perception and triumph 
over life. Kant and his successors all espoused 
Hume’s opinion that the immediately given is 
a disconnected ‘manifold.’ But unwilling sim- 
ply to accept the manifold, as Hume did, they 
invoked a superior agent in the shape of what 
Kant called the ‘transcendental ego of apper- 
ception ’ to patch its bits together by synthetic 
‘categories.’ Among these categories Kant in- 
scribes that of ‘causality,’ and in many quar- 


1 These expressions are Bergson’s. 
200 


NOVELTY AND CAUSATION 


ters he passes for a repairer of the havoc that 
Hume made. 

His chapter on Cause 1 is the most confusedly 
written part of his famous Critique, and its 
meaning is often hard to catch. As I under- 
stand his text, he leaves things just where 
Hume did, save that where Hume says ‘habit’ 
Kant he says ‘rule.’ They both cancel the 
notion that phenomena called causal ever ex- 
ert ‘power,’ or that a single case would ever 
have suggested cause and effect. In other 
words Kant contradicts common sense as much 
as Hume does and, like Hume, translates caus- 
ation into mere time-succession ; only, whereas 
the order in time was essentially ‘loose’ for 
Hume and only subjectively uniform, Kant 
calls its uniformity ‘ objective as obtaining in 
conformity to a law, which our Sinnlichkeit 
receives from our Ver stand.' Non-causal se- 
quences can be reversed; causal ones follow in 
conformity to rule . 2 

1 Entitled ‘The Second Analogy of Experience,’ it begins on page 
232 of the second edition of his Critique of Pure Reason. 

2 Kant’s whole notion of a ‘ rule ’ is inconstruable by me. What or 
whom does the rule bind? If it binds the phenomenon that follows 

201 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 


The word Verstand in Kant’s account must 
not be taken as if the rule it is supposed to set 
to sensation made us understand things any 
better. It is a brute rule of sequence which 
reveals no ‘tie.’ The non-rationality of such a 
‘category’ leaves it worthless for purposes of 
insight. It removes dynamic causation and 
substitutes no other explanation for the se- 
quences found. It yields external descriptions 
only, and assimilates all cases to those where 
we discover no reason for the law ascertained. 

Our ‘ laws of nature ’ do indeed in large part 
enumerate bare coexistences and successions. 
Yellowness and malleability coexist in gold; 
redness succeeds on boiling in lobsters; coagu- 

(the ‘ effect ’) we fall back into the popular dynamic view, and any 
single case would exhibit causal action, even were there no other cases 
in the world. — Or does it bind the observer of the single case? But 
his own sensations of sequence are what bind him. Be a sequence 
causal or non-causal, if it is sensible, he cannot turn it backwards as he 
can his ideas. Or does the rule bind future sequences and determine 
them to follow in the same order which the first sequence observed? 
Since it obviously does not do this when the observer judges wrongly 
that the first sequence is causal, all we can say is that it is a rule where- 
by his expectations of uniformity follow his causal judgments, be these 
latter true or false. But wherein would this differ from the humean po- 
sition? Kant, in short, flounders, and in no truthful sense can one keep 
repeating that he has ‘refuted Hume.’ 

202 


NOVELTY AND CAUSATION 


lation in eggs ; and to him who asks for the Why 
of these uniformities, science only replies: 
Positivism ‘Not yet’! Meanwhile the laws are 
potent for prediction, and many writers on 
science tell us that this is all we can demand. 
To explain, according to the way of thinking 
called positivistic, is only to substitute wider 
or more familiar, for narrower or less familiar 
laws, and the laws at their widest only express 
uniformities empirically found. Why does the 
pump suck up water? Because the air keeps 
pressing it into the tube. Why does the air 
press in? Because the earth attracts it. Why 
does the earth attract it? Because it attracts 
everything — such attraction being in the end 
only a more universal sort of fact. Laws, ac- 
cording to their view, only generalize facts, 
they do not connect them in any intimate 
sense . 1 

Against this purely inductive way of treat- 
ing causal sequences, a more deductive inter- 

1 For expressions of this view the student may consult J. S. Mill’s 
Logic, book 3, chap, xii; W. S. Jevons’s Principles of Science, book 
6; J. Venn’s Empirical Logic, chap, xxi, and K. Pearson’s Grammar 
of Science, chap. iii. 


203 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 


pretation has recently been urged. If the later 

member of a succession could be deduced 

Deductive By logic from the earlier member, 
theories of 

causation in the particular sequence the ‘tie’ 
would be unmistakable. But logical ties carry 
us only from sames to sanies; so this last phase 
of scientific method is at bottom only the 
scholastic principle of Causa cequat efectum , 
brought into sharper focus and illustrated 
more concretely. It is thoroughly monistic in 
its aims, and if it could be worked out in detail 
it would turn the real world into the procession 
of an eternal identity, with the appearances, 
of which we are perceptually conscious, oc- 
curring as a sort of by-product to which no 
‘scientific’ importance should be attached . 1 
In any case no real growth and no real novelty 
could effect an entrance into life . 2 

1 ‘ Consciousness,’ writes M. Couturat, to cite a handy expression of 
this mode of thought, ‘is properly speaking, the realm of the unreal. . . . 
What remains in our subjective consciousness, after all objective facts 
have been projected and located in space and time, is the rubbish and 
residuum of the construction of the universe, the formless mass of 
images that were unable to enter into the system of nature and put on 
the garment of reality ’ ( Revue de Metaphysique, etc., v, 244). 

2 I avoid amplifying this conception of cause and effect. An immense 
number of causal facts can indeed be explained satisfactorily by as- 

204 


NOVELTY AND CAUSATION 


This negation of real novelty seems to be 
the upshot of the conceptualist philosophy of 
causation. This is why I called it on page 189 
Summary the classic obstacle to the acceptance 

and con- 
clusion of pluralism’s additive world. The 

principle of causality begins as a hybrid be- 
tween common sense and intellectualism : — 
what actively produces an effect, it says, must 
‘in some way ’ contain the ‘power ’ of it already. 

suming that the effect is only a later position of the cause; and for the 
remainder we can fall back on the aliquo modo which gave such com- 
fort in the past. Such an interpretation of nature would, of course, 
relegate variety, activity, and novelty to the limbo of illusions, as fast 
as it succeeded in making its static concepts cancel living facts. It is 
hard to be sincere, however, in following the conceptual method ruth- 
lessly ; and of the writers who think that in science causality must 
mean identity, some willingly allow that all such scientific explanation 
is more or less artificial, that identical ‘ molecules ’ and ‘ atoms ’ are like 
identical ‘pounds ’ and ‘yards,’ only pegs in a conceptual arrangement 
for hanging percepts on in ‘one to one relations,’ so as to predict facts 
in ‘ elegant’ or expeditious ways. This is the view of the conceptual 
universe which our own discussion has insisted on ; and, taking scientific 
logic in this way, no harm is done. Almost no one is radical in using 
scientific logic metaphysically. Readers wishing for more discussion of 
the monistic view of cause, may consult G. H. Lewes: Problems of Life 
and Mind, problem 5, chap, iii ; A. Riehl : Der philosophische Kriticismus 
(1879), 2ter Absn., Kap 2 ; G. Heymans: Die Gesetze u. Elemente d, 
wissenschaftlichen Denlcens, par. 83-85. Compare also B. P. Bowne: 
Metaphysics, revised edition, part i, chap. iv. Perhaps the most instruc- 
tive general discussion of causation is that in C. Sigwart: Logic, 2d 
edition, par. 73. Chap, v of book 3 in J. S. Mill’s Logic may be called 
classical. 


205 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 


But as nothing corresponding to the concept 
of power can be insulated, the activity-feature 
of the sequence erelong gets suppressed, and 
the vague latency, supposed to exist aliquo 
modo in the causal phenomenon, of the effect 
about to be produced, is developed into a sta- 
tic relation of identity between two concepts 
which the mind substitutes for the percepts 
between which the causal tie originally was 
found . 1 

The resultant state of ‘ enlightened opinion ’ 
about cause, is, as I have called it before, con- 
fused and unsatisfactory. Few philosophers 
hold radically to the identity view. The view 
of the logicians of science is easier to believe 

1 I omit saying anything in my text about ‘energetics.’ Popular 
writers often appear to think that ‘science’ has demonstrated a monis- 
tic principle called ‘energy,’ which they connect with activity on the 
one hand and with quantity on the other. So far as I understand this 
difficult subject, ‘energy ’ is not a principle at all, still less an active 
one. It is only a collective name for certain amounts of immediate 
perceptual reality, when such reality is measured in definite ways that 
allow its changes to be written so as to get constant sums. It is not an 
ontological theory at all, but a magnificent economic schematic device 
for keeping account of the functional variations of the surface phe- 
nomena. It is evidently a case of ‘nonfingo hypotheses,’ and since it 
tolerates perceptual reality, it ought to be regarded as neutral in our 
causal debate. 


206 


NOVELTY AND CAUSATION 


but not easier to believe metaphysically, for it 
violates instinct almost as strongly. Mathema- 
ticians make use, to connect the various inter- 
dependencies of quantities, of the general con- 
cept of function. That A is a function of B (A 
equals B) means that with every alteration in 
the value of A, an alteration in that of B is 
always connected. If we generalize so as also 
to include qualitative dependencies, we can 
conceive the universe as consisting of nothing 
but elements with functional relations between 
them; and science has then for its sole task the 
listing of the elements and the describing in 
the simplest possible terms the functional ‘re- 
lations.’ 1 Changes, in short, occur, and ring 
throughout phenomena, but neither reasons, 
nor activities in the sense of agencies, have 
any place in this world of scientific logic, 
which compared with the world of common 
sense, is so abstract as to be quite spectral, 
and merits the appellation (so often quoted 
from Mr. Bradley) of ‘an unearthly ballet 
of bloodless categories.’ 


1 W. Jerusalem: Einleitung in die Philosophic, 4te Aufl., 145. 


CHAPTER XIII 


NOVELTY AND CAUSATION — THE 
PERCEPTUAL VIEW 

Most persons remain quite incredulous when 
they are told that the rational principle of 
causality has exploded our native belief in naif 
activity as something real, and our assumption 
that genuinely new fact can be created by 
work done. ‘Le sens de la vie qui s’indigne de 
tant de discours,’ awakens in them and snaps 
its fingers at the ‘ critical ’ view. The present 
writer has also just called the critical view an 
incomplete abstraction. But its ‘functional 
laws’ and schematisms are splendid^ useful, 
and its negations are true oftener than is com- 
monly supposed. We feel as if our ‘will’ im- 
mediately moved our members, and we ignore 
the brain-cells whose activity that will must 
first arouse; we think we cause the bell-ring, 
but we only close a contact and the battery in 
the cellar rings the bell; we think a certain 
star’s light is the cause of our now seeing it, 
but ether-waves are the causes, and the star 

208 


NOVELTY AND CAUSATION 


may have been extinguished long ago. We call 

the ‘draft/ the cause of our ‘cold’; but without 

co-operant microbes the draft could do no harm. 

Defects of Mill says that causes must be un- 

the percept- conditional antecedents, and Venn 
ual view do 

not warrant that they must be ‘close’ ones. In 
scepticism 

nature s numerous successions so 
many links are hidden, that we seldom know 
exactly which antecedent is unconditional or 
which is close. Often the cause which we name 
only fits some other cause for producing the 
phenomenon ; and things, as Mill says, are fre- 
quently then most active when we assume 
them to be acted upon. 

This vast amount of error in our instinctive 
perceptions of causal activity encourages the 
conceptualist view. A step farther, and we sus- 
pect that to suppose causal activity anywhere 
may be a blunder, and that only consecutions 
and juxtapositions can be real. Such sweep- 
ing scepticism is, however, quite uncalled for. 
Other parts of experience expose us to error, 
yet we do not say that in them is no truth. We 
see trains moving at stations, when they are 

209 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 


really standing still, or falsely we feel ourselves 
to be moving, when we are giddy, without such 
errors leading us to deny that motion anywhere 
exists. It exists elsewhere; and the problem is 
to place it rightly. It is the same with all other 
illusions of sense. 

There is doubtless somewhere an original 
perceptual experience of the kind of thing we 
mean by causation, and that kind of thing 
we locate in various other places, rightly or 
wrongly as the case may be. Where now is the 
typical experience originally got? 

Evidently it is got in our own personal activ- 
ity-situations. In all of these what we feel is 
that a previous field of ‘consciousness’ con- 
taining (in the midst of its complexity) the 
The per idea a resu ^’ develops gradually 

ceptuai into another field in which that re- 
experience 

of causa- suit either appears as accomplished, 
or else is prevented by obstacles 
against which we still feel ourselves to press. 
As I now write, I am in one of these activity 
situations. I ‘ strive ’ after words, which I only 
half prefigure, but which, when they shall have 

210 


NOVELTY AND CAUSATION 


come, must satisfactorily complete the nascent 
sense I have of what they ought to be. The 
words are to run out of my pen, which I find 
that my hand actuates so obediently to desire 
that I am hardly conscious either of resistance 
or of effort. Some of the words come wrong, 
and then I do feel a resistance, not muscular 
but mental, which instigates a new instalment 
of my activity, accompanied by more or less 
feeling of exertion. If the resistance were to 
my muscles, the exertion would contain an ele- 
ment of strain or squeeze which is less present 
where the resistance is only mental. If it proves 
considerable in either kind I may leave off try- 
ing to overcome it; or, on the other hand, I may 
sustain my effort till I have succeeded in my 
aim. 

It seems to me that in such a continuously 
developing experiential series our concrete 
perception of causality is found in operation. 
If the word have any meaning at all it must 
mean what there we live through. What ‘effi- 
cacy’ and ‘activity’ are known-as is what 
these appear. 


211 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 


The experiencer of such a situation feels the 
push, the obstacle, the will, the strain, the 
triumph, or the passive giving up, just as he 
feels the time, the space, the swiftness of intens- 
ity, the movement, the weight and color, the 
pain and pleasure, the complexity, or what- 
ever remaining characters the situation may 
involve. He goes through all that can ever 
be imagined where activity is supposed. The 
word ‘activity’ has no content save these 
experiences of process, obstruction, striving, 
strain, or release, ultimate qualia as they are of 
the life given us to be known. No matter what 
in it ‘efficacies’ there may really be in 

* final * 

and ‘ ef- this extraordinary universe it is im- 
ficient ’ possible to conceive of any one of 

coincide them being either lived through or 

authentically known otherwise than in this 
dramatic shape of something sustaining a felt 
purpose against felt obstacles, and overcoming 
or being overcome. What ‘sustaining’ means 
here is clear to anyone who has lived through 
the experience, but to no one else; just as 
‘loud,’ ‘red,’ ‘sweet,’ mean something only to 


NOVELTY AND CAUSATION 


beings with ears, eyes, and tongues. The per- 
dpi in these originals of experience is the esse; 
the curtain is the picture. If there is anything 
hiding in the background, it ought not to be 
called causal agency, but should get itself an- 
other name. 

The way in which we feel that our successive 
fields continue each other in these cases is evi- 
dently what the orthodox doctrine means when 
it vaguely says that ‘in some way’ the cause 
‘contains’ the effect. It contains it by propos- 
ing it as the end pursued. Since the desire of 
that end is the efficient cause, we see that in 
the total fact of personal activity final and 
efficient causes coalesce. Yet the effect is often- 
est contained aliquo modo only, and seldom 
explicitly foreseen. The activity sets up more 
effects than it proposes literally. The end is 
defined beforehand in most cases only as a 
And novel- general direction, along which all 
ties anse sor t s of novelties and surprises lie in 
wait. These words I write even now surprise 
me ; yet I adopt them as effects of my scripto- 
rial causality. Their being ‘contained’ means 

213 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 


only their harmony and continuity with my 
general aim. They ‘fill the bill’ and I accept 
them, but the exact shape of them seems deter- 
mined by something outside of my explicit will. 

If we look at the general mass of things in 
the midst of which the life of men is passed, 
and ask ‘How came they here?’ the only broad 
answer is that man’s desires preceded and pro- 
duced them. If not all-sufficient causes, desire 
and will were at any rate what John Mill calls 
unconditional causes, indispensable causes 
namely, without which the effects could not 
have come at all. Human causal activity is the 
only known unconditional antecedent of the 
works of civilization; so we find, as Edward 
Carpenter says , 1 something like a law of na- 
ture, the law that a movement from feeling to 
thought and thence to action, from the world 
of dreams to the world of things, is everywhere 
going on. Since at each phase of this move- 
ment novelties turn up, we may fairly ask, with 
Carpenter, whether we are not here witnessing 
in our own personal experience what is really 

1 The Art of Creation, 1894, chap. i. 

214 


NOVELTY AND CAUSATION 


the essential process of creation. Is not the 
world really growing in these activities of ours? 
And where we predicate activities elsewhere, 
have we a right to suppose aught different in 
kind from this? 

To some such vague vision are we brought 
by taking our perceptual experience of action 
at its face-value, and following the analogies 
which it suggests. 

I say vague vision, for even if our desires be 
an unconditional causal factor in the only part 
Perceptual of the universe where we are inti- 
sets a * 1011 mately acquainted with the way 
problem creative work is done, desire is any- 
thing but a close factor, even there. The part 
of the world to which our desires lie closest is, 
by the consent of physiologists, the cortex of 
the brain. If they act causally, their first effect 
is there, and only through innumerable neural, 
muscular, and instrumental intermediaries is 
that last effect which they consciously aimed 
at brought to birth. Our trust in the face-value 
of perception was apparently misleading. 
There is no such continuity between cause-and- 

215 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 


effect as in our activity-experiences was made 
to appear. There is disruption rather; and 
what we naively assume to be continuous is 
separated by causal successions of which per- 
ception is wholly unaware. 

The logical conclusion would seem to be that 
even if the kind of thing that causation is, were 
revealed to us in our own activity, we should 
be mistaken on the very threshold if we sup- 
posed that the fact of it is there. In other 
words we seem in this line of experience to start 
with an illusion of place. It is as if a baby were 
born at a kinetoscope-show and his first experi- 
ences were of the illusions of movement that 
reigned in the place. The nature of movement 
would indeed be revealed to him, but the real 
facts of movement he would have to seek out- 
side. Even so our will-acts may reveal the na- 
ture of causation, but just where the facts of 
causation are located may be a further pro- 
blem . 1 With this further problem, philosophy 

1 With this cause-and-effect are in what is called a transitive rela- 
tion : as ‘ more than more is more than less,’ so ‘ cause of cause is cause 
of effect.’ In a chain of causes, intermediaries can drop out and (logi- 
cally at least) the relation still hold between the extreme terms, the 

216 


NOVELTY AND CAUSATION 


leaves off comparing conceptual with percept- 
ual experience, and begins enquiring into 
physical and psychological facts. 

Perception has given us a positive idea of 
causal agency but it remains to be ascertained 
whether what first appears as such, 

This is the 

problem of is really such ; whether aught else is 
the relation 

of mind to really such; or finally, whether no- 
thing really such exists. Since with 
this we are led immediately into the mind- 
brain relation, and since that is such a compli- 
cated topic, we had better interrupt our study 
of causation provisionally at the present point, 
meaning to complete it when the problem of 
the mind’s relation to the body comes up for 
review. 

Our outcome so far seems therefore to be 
only this, that the attempt to treat ‘cause,’ 
Conclusion for conceptual purposes, as a sepa- 
rable link, has failed historically, and has led 
to the denial of efficient causation, and to the 

wider causal span enveloping, without altering the ‘ closer * one. This 
consideration may provisionally mitigate the impression of falsehood 
which psychophysical criticism finds in our consciousness of activity. 
The subject will come up later in more detail. 

217 


SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 


substitution for it of tlie bare descriptive no- 
tion of uniform sequence among events. Thus 
intellectualist philosophy once more has had 
to butcher our perceptual life in order to make 
it ‘comprehensible.’ Meanwhile the concrete 
perceptual flux, taken just as it comes, offers 
in our own activity-situations perfectly com- 
prehensible instances of causal agency. The 
transitive causation in them does not, it is 
true, stick out as a separate piece of fact for 
conception to fix upon. Rather does a whole 
subsequent field grow continuously out of a 
whole antecedent field because it seems to yield 
new being of the nature called for, while the 
feeling of causality -at-work flavors the entire 
concrete sequence as salt flavors the water in 
which it is dissolved. 

If we took these experiences as the type of 
what actual causation is, we should have to as- 
cribe to cases of causation outside of our own 
life, to physical cases also, an inwardly experi- 
ential nature. In other words we should have to 
espouse a so-called ‘ pan-psychic ’ philosophy. 
This complication, and the fact that hidden 

218 


NOVELTY AND CAUSATION 


brain-events appear to be ‘closer’ effects than 
those which consciousness directly aims at, lead 
us to interrupt the subject here provisionally. 
Our main result, up to this point, has been the 
contrast between the perceptual and the intel- 
lectualist treatment of it . 1 

1 Almost no philosopher has admitted that perception can give us 
relations immediately. Relations have invariably been called the work 
of ‘ thought,’ so cause must be a ‘category.’ The result is well shown 
in such a treatment of the subject as Mr. Shadworth Hodgson’s, in his 
elaborate work the Metaphysic of Experience. ‘ What we call conscious 
activity is not a consciousness of activity in the sense of an immediate 
perception of it. Try to perceive activity or effort immediately, and 
you will fail; you will find nothing there to perceive ’ ( i, 180). As 
there is nothing there to conceive either, in the discrete manner 
which Mr. Hodgson desiderates, he has to conclude that ‘Causality 
per se (why need it be per se?) has no scientific or philosophic justifica- 
tion. . . . All cases of common-sense causality resolve themselves, on 
analysis, into cases of post hoc, cum illo, evenit istud. Hence we say that 
the search for causes is given up in science and philosophy, and re- 
placed by the search for real conditions (i. e., phenomenal antecedents 
merely) and the laws of real conditioning.’ It must also be recognized 
that realities answering to the terms cause and causality per se are 
impossible and non-existent’ (ii, 374-378). 

The author whose discussion most resembles my own (apart from 
Bergson’s, of which more later) is Prof. James Ward in his Naturalism 
and Agnosticism (see the words ‘activity’ and ‘causality’ in the in- 
dex). Consult also the chapter on ‘Mental Activity ’ in G. F. Stout’s 
Analytic Psychology, vol. i. W. James’s Pluralistic Universe, Appendix 
B, may also be consulted. Some authors seem to think that we do have 
an ideal conception of genuine activity which none of our experiences, 
least of all personal ones, match, Hence, and not because activity is a 
spurious idea altogether, are all the activities we imagine false. Mr. F. 
H. Bradley seems to occupy some such position, but I am not sure. 




APPENDIX 


FAITH AND THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE 1 

Intellectualism ’ is the belief that our mind 
comes upon a world complete in itself, and has the 
duty of ascertaining its contents; but has no power 
of re-determining its character, for that is already 
given. 

Among intellectualists two parties may be dis- 
tinguished. Rationalizing intellectualists lay stress 
on deductive and ‘dialectic’ arguments, making 
large use of abstract concepts and pure logic (Hegel, 
Bradley, Taylor, Royce). Empiricist intellectual- 
ists are more ‘scientific,’ and think that the char- 
acter of the world must be sought in our sensible 
experiences, and found in hypotheses based exclu- 
sively thereon (Clifford, Pearson). 

Both sides insist that in our conclusions personal 
preferences should play no part, and that no argu- 
ment from what ought to be to what is, is valid. 
‘Faith,’ being the greeting of our whole nature to 
a kind of world conceived as well adapted to that 
nature, is forbidden, until purely intellectual evi- 

1 [The following pages, part of a syllabus printed for the use of 
students in an introductory course in philosophy, were found with 
the MS. of this book, with the words, ‘To be printed as part of the In- 
troduction to Philosophy,’ noted thereon in the author’s handwrit- 
ing. Ed.] 


221 


APPENDIX 


dence that such is the actual world has come in. 
Even if evidence should eventually prove a faith 
true, the truth, says Clifford, would have been 
‘stolen,’ if assumed and acted on too soon. 

Refusal to believe anything concerning which 
‘evidence’ has not yet come in, would thus be the 
rule of intellectualism. Obviously it postulates cer- 
tain conditions, which for aught we can see need 
not necessarily apply to all the dealings of our 
minds with the Universe to which they belong. 

1. It postulates that to escape error is our para- 
mount duty. Faith may grasp truth; but also it 
may not. By resisting it always, we are sure of 
escaping error; and if by the same act we renounce 
our chance at truth, that loss is the lesser evil, and 
should be incurred. 

2. It postulates that in every respect the uni- 
verse is finished in advance of our dealings with it; 

That the knowledge of what it thus is, is best 
gained by a passively receptive mind, with no 
native sense of probability, or good-will towards 
any special result; 

That ‘evidence’ not only needs no good-will for 
its reception; but is able, if patiently waited for, to 
neutralize ill-will; 

Finally, that our beliefs and our acts based there- 
upon, although they are parts of the world, and 

222 


APPENDIX 


although the world without them is unfinished, are 
yet such mere externalities as not to alter in any 
way the significance of the rest of the world when 
they are added to it. 

In our dealings with many details of fact these 
postulates work well. Such details exist in advance 
of our opinion; truth concerning them is often of no 
pressing importance; and by believing nothing, we 
escape error while we wait. But even here we often 
cannot wait but must act, somehow; so we act on 
the most 'probable hypothesis, trusting that the 
event may prove us wise. Moreover, not to act on 
one belief, is often equivalent to acting as if the 
opposite belief were true, so inaction would not 
always be as ‘passive’ as the intellectualists as- 
sume. It is one attitude of will. 

Again, Philosophy and Religion have to interpret 
the total character of the world, and it is by no 
means clear that here the intellectualist postulates 
obtain. It may be true all the while (even though 
the evidence be still imperfect) that, as Paulsen 
says, ‘the natural order is at bottom a moral order.’ 
It may be true that work is still doing in the world- 
process, and that in that work we are called to bear 
our share. The character of the world’s results may 
in part depend upon our acts. Our acts may depend 
on our religion, — on our not-resisting our faith- 


l 


223 


APPENDIX 


tendencies, or on our sustaining them in spite of 
‘evidence’ being incomplete. These faith-tenden- 
cies in turn are but expressions of our good-will 
towards certain forms of result. 

Such faith-tendencies are extremely active psy- 
chological forces, constantly outstripping evidence. 
The following steps may be called the ‘ f aith-ladder ’ : 

1 . There is nothing absurd in a certain view of the 
world being true, nothing self-contradictory ; 

2. It might have been true under certain condi- 
tions; 

3. It may be true, even now; 

4. It is fit to be true; 

5. It ought to be true; 

6. It must be true; 

7. It shall be true, at any rate true for me. 

Obviously this is no intellectual chain of infer- 
ences, like the sorites of the logic-books. Yet it is 
a slope of good-will on which in the larger questions 
of life men habitually live. 

Intellectualism’s proclamation that our’good-will, 
our ‘will to believe,’ is a pure disturber of truth, is 
itself an act of faith of the most arbitrary kind. It 
implies the will to insist on a universe of intellectu- 
alist constitution, and the willingness to stand in 
the way of a pluralistic universe’s success, such 
success requiring the good-will and active faith, 

224 


APPENDIX 


theoretical as well as practical, of all concerned, to 
make it ‘come true.’ 

Intellectualism thus contradicts itself. It is a 
sufficient objection to it, that if a ‘pluralistically’ 
organized, or ‘ co-operative ’ universe or the ‘ melio- 
ristic’ universe above, were really here, the veto 
of intellectualism on letting our good-will ever have 
any vote would debar us from ever admitting that 
universe to be true. 

Faith thus remains as one of the inalienable birth- 
rights of our mind. Of course it must remain a 
practical, and not a dogmatic attitude. It must go 
with toleration of other faiths, with the search for 
the most probable, and with the full consciousness 
of responsibilities and risks. 

It may be regarded as a formative factor in the 
universe, if we be integral parts thereof, and co- 
determinants, by our behavior, of what its total 
character may be. 

How we Act on Probabilities 

In most emergencies we have to act on probabil- 
ity, and incur the risk of error. 

‘Probability’ and ‘possibility’ are terms ap- 
plied to things of the conditions of whose coming 
we are (to some degree at least) ignorant. 

If we are entirely ignorant of the conditions that 
225 


APPENDIX 


make a thing come, we call it a ‘bare’ possibility. 
If we know that some of the conditions already 
exist, it is for us in so far forth a ‘grounded’ pos- 
sibility. It is in that case probable just in propor- 
tion as the said conditions are numerous, and few 
hindering conditions are in sight. 

When the conditions are so numerous and con- 
fused that we can hardly follow them, we treat a 
thing as probable in proportion to the frequency 
with which things of that kind occur. Such fre- 
quency being a fraction, the probability is expressed 
by a fraction. Thus, if one death in 10,000 is by 
suicide, the antecedent probability of my death 
being a suicide is 1-10, 000th. If one house in 5000 
burns down annually, the probability that my house 
will burn is l-5000th, etc. 

Statistics show that in most kinds of thing the 
frequency is pretty regular. Insurance companies 
bank on this regularity, undertaking to pay (say) 
5000 dollars to each man whose house burns, pro- 
vided he and the other house-owners each pay 
enough to give the company that sum, plus some- 
thing more for profits and expenses. 

The company, hedging on the large number of 
cases it deals with, and working by the long run, 
need run no risk of loss by the single fires. 

The individual householder deals with his own 
226 


APPENDIX 


single case exclusively. The probability of his house 
burning is only 1-5000, but if that lot befall he 
will lose everything. He has no Tong run ’ to go by, 
if his house takes fire, and he can’t hedge as the 
company does, by taxing his more fortunate neigh- 
bors. But in this particular kind of risk, the com- 
pany helps him out. It translates his one chance in 
5000 of a big loss, into a certain loss 5000 times 
smaller, and the bargain is a fair one on both sides. 
It is clearly better for the man to lose certainly, but 
fractionally, than to trust to his 4999 chances of no 
loss, and then have the improbable chance befall. 

But for most of our emergencies there is no insur- 
ance company at hand, and fractional solutions are 
impossible. Seldom can we act fractionally. If the 
probability that a friend is waiting for you in Bos- 
tion is 1-2, how should you act on that probability? 
By going as far as the bridge? Better stay at home ! 
Or if the probability is 1-2 that your partner is a 
villain, how should you act on that probability? 
By treating him as a villain one day, and confiding 
your money and your secrets to him the next? 
That would be the worst of all solutions. In all such 
cases we must act wholly for one or the other horn of 
the dilemma. We must go in for the more probable 
alternative as if the other one did not exist, and 
suffer the full penalty if the event belie our faith. 

227 


APPENDIX 


Now the metaphysical and religious alternatives 
are largely of this kind. We have but this one life 
in which to take up our attitude towards them, no 
insurance company is there to cover us, and if we 
are wrong, our error, even though it be not as great 
as the old hell-fire theology pretended, may yet be 
momentous. In such questions as that of the char- 
acter of the world, of life being moral in its essential 
meaning, of our playing a vital part therein, etc., 
it would seem as if a certain wholeness in’ our faith 
were necessary. To calculate the probabilities and 
act fractionally, and treat life one day as a farce, 
and another day as a very serious business, would 
be to make the worst possible mess of it. Inaction 
also often counts as action. In many issues the 
inertia of one member will impede the success of 
the whole as much as his opposition will. To refuse, 
e. g., to testify against villainy, is practically to 
help it to prevail . 1 

The Pluralistic or Melioristic Universe 

Finally, if the ‘melioristic’ universe were really 
here, it would require the active good-will of all of 
us, in the way of belief as well as of our other ac- 
tivities, to bring it to a prosperous issue. 

The melioristic universe is conceived after a 

1 Cf. Wm. James: The Will to Believe, etc., pp. 1-31, and 90-110. 

228 


APPENDIX 


social analogy, as a pluralism of independent pow- f 
ers. It will succeed just in proportion as more of 
these work for its success. If none work, it will fail. 
If each does his best, it will not fail. Its destiny 
thus hangs on an if, or on a lot of ifs — which 
amounts to saying (in the technical language of 
logic) that, the world being as yet unfinished, its 
total character can be expressed only by hypotheti- 
cal and not by categorical propositions. 

(Empiricism, believing in possibilities, is willing 
to formulate its universe in hypothetical proposi- 
tions. Rationalism, believing only in impossibili- 
ties and necessities, insists on the contrary on their 
being categorical.) 

As individual members of a pluralistic universe, 
we must recognize that, even though we do our best, 
the other factors also will have a voice in the result. 

If they refuse to conspire, our good-will and labor 
may be thrown away. No insurance company can 
here cover us or save us from the risks we run in 
being part of such a world. 

We must take one of four attitudes in regard to 
the other powers : either 

1. Follow intellectualist advice: wait for evi- 
dence; and while waiting, do nothing; or 

2. Mistrust the other powers and, sure that the 
universe will fail, let it fail; or 

229 


APPENDIX 


3. Trust them; and at any rate do our best, in 
spite of the if; or, finally, 

4. Flounder , spending one day in one attitude, 
another day in another. 

This 4th way is no systematic solution. The 2d 
way spells faith in failure. The 1st way may in 
practice be indistinguishable from the 2d way. 
The 3d way seems the only wise way. 

‘ If we do our best, and the other powers do their 
best, the world will be perfected ’ — this proposi- 
tion expresses no actual fact, but only the com- 
plexion of a fact thought of as eventually possible. 
As it stands, no conclusion can be positively de- 
duced from it. A conclusion would require another 
; premise of fact, which only we can supply. The origi- 
nal proposition per se has no pragmatic value whatso- 
ever, apart from its power to challenge our will to 
produce the premise of fact required. Then indeed 
the perfected world emerges as a logical conclusion. 

We can create the conclusion, then. We can and 
we may, as it were, jump with both feet off the 
ground into or towards a world of which we trust 
the other parts to meet our jump — and only so 
can the making of a perfected world of the pluralis- 
tic pattern ever take place. Only through our pre- 
cursive trust in it can it come into being. 

There is no inconsistency anywhere in this, and 
230 


APPENDIX 


no ‘vicious circle’ unless a circle of poles holding 
themselves upright by leaning on one another, or a 
circle of dancers revolving by holding each other’s 
hands, be ‘vicious.’ 

The faith circle is so congruous with human 
nature that the only explanation of the veto that 
intellectualists pass upon it must be sought in the 
offensive character to them of the faiths of certain 
concrete persons. 

Such possibilities of offense have, however, to be 
put up with on empiricist principles. The long run 
of experience may weed out the more foolish faiths. 
Those who held them will then have failed: but 
without the wiser faiths of the others the world 
could never be perfected. 

(Compare G. Lowes Dickinson: “Religion, a 
Criticism and a Forecast,” N. Y. 1905, Introduc- 
tion; and chaps, iii, iv.) 


INDEX 


Absolute idealism, 137 ; defects of, 
138. 

Activity, intellectually incompre- 
hensible, 85. 

Alembert, d’, 114. 

Al-Ghazzali, 117 note . 

Anaxagoras, 11. 

Anselm, St., 43 note. 

Antinomies, Kant’s, 160. 

Aquinas, St. Thomas, 11, 12, 43. 

Archimedes, 148. 

Aristotle, 7, 11, 12, 24, 34, 36, 38, 
53, 55 note, 65, 148, 150 note, 
190. 

Bakewell, C. M., 54 note, 116 note. 

Baldwin, J. M., 6 note. 

Bax, Belfort, 101 note. 

Being, problem of, 38; various 
treatments of problem of, 40; 
rationalist and empiricist treat- 
ments, 42 ; Hegel's mediation 
of with non-being, 44 ; same 
amount of must be begged by 
all, 45; conservation vs. crea- 
tion of, 45. 

Bergson, 37, 91, 92, 93, 96, 97 note, 
200 note, 219 note. 

Berkeley, 37, 121, 122. 

Bossuet, 54 note. 

Bouillier, F., 116 note. 

Bowne, B. P., 124 note, 205 note. 

Boyle, 20, 21. 

Bradley, 84, 91, 92, 93, 94, 107 
note, 207, 219 note, 221. 

Burnet, J., 157 note. 


Cantor, 174, 177, 182. 

Carpenter, E., 214. 

Cauchy, 184. 

Causation, 85; Aristotle on, 190; 
scholasticism on efficient, 191; 
occasionalistic theory of, 194; 
Leibnitzon, 195; Hume on, 196; 
criticism of Hume on, 198; Kant 
on, 200; positivism on, 203; de- 
ductive theories of, 204; con- 
ceptual view of negates novelty, 
205; defects of perceptual view 
of do not warrant scepticism, 
209; nature of perceptual expe- 
rience of, 210; ‘ final ’ and 
‘ efficient ’ mingle in perceptual 
experience, 212; perceptual, 
sets a problem, 215. 

Change, conceptually impossible, 
87. 

Clerk-Maxwell, 66. 

Clifford, 221, 222. 

Coleridge, 34. 

Comte, A., 16. 

Concatenation, unity by, 129. 

Conception, a secondary process, 
79; and novelty, 154. 

Concepts, distinguished from per- 
cept, 48; discreteness of , 48 ; in- 
terpenetrate with percepts, 52; 
dignity of knowledge of, 54 ; con- 
tent and function of, 58; origin- 
ate in utility, 63; theoretic use 
of, 65 ; in the a priori sciences, 
67; in physics, 70; bring new 
values, 71 ; role of in human life, 
73; secondary formations, 79; 
inadequate, 81; static, 85; Brad- 
ley on, 92; self-sameness of , 102; 


Cairds, the, 85. 
Calderwood, H., 156 note. 


233 


INDEX 


consubstantial with percepts, 
107 ; designative only. 111. 

Conceptual knowledge, rational- 
ist view of, 55; empiricist view 
of, 57. 

Conceptual order, the, 50; unlim- 
ited, 52; a topographic system, 
66 . 

Conceptual systems, distinct 
realms of reality, 101. 

Conceptual translation, defects of, 
78; examples of puzzles intro- 
duced by, 85. 

Conservation vs. creation, 45. 

Continuity theory, the, 155. 

Cordemoy, 195. 

Couturat, L., 183 note, 204 note. 

Creed, the intellectualist, 75. 

Cudworth, R., 54 note, 57 note. 

Dalton, 20. 

Delboeuf, 148, 149 note. 

Democritus, 11, 34, 35, 149 note. 

Descartes, 13, 20, 21, 22, 24, 36, 
43 note, 148, 150 note, 194, 
195. 

Dewey, J., 6, 37. 

Dickinson, G. Lowes, 231. 

Direction, concept of, impossible 
till process completed, 88. 

Discontinuity theory, the, 154. 

Dresser, H. W., 92 note. 

Duhem, 91 note, 150 note. 

Emerson, 56, 70, 72 note. 

Empedocles, 11. 

Empiricism, confirmed by de- 
fects of concepts, 98; willing to 
use hypotheticals, 229. 

Empiricists, contrasted with ra- 
tionalists, 35. 

Energetics, 206 note. 


Evellin, 184. 

Evil, problem of, 138. 

Faith, vs. evidence, 221 ; — ten- 
dencies, 224; a practical atti- 
tude, 225. 

Fawcett, E. D., 101 note. 

Fichte, 137 note. 

Frazer, J. G., 18 note. 

Freedom, 139; opposed by mon- 
ism, 140. 

Fullerton, G. M., 184 note. 

Galileo, 20, 21, 22. 

Green, 85. 

Geulincx, 195. 

Habits of thought, origins of, 16. 

Hamilton, Sir W., 50 note, 194 
note. 

Harper, T. J., 12 note. 

Harvey, 20. 

Hegel, 36, 43, 48 note, 57, 91, 92, 
137 note, 169, 223. 

Helvetius, 55 note. 

Heracleitus, 11. 

Heymans, G., 205 note. 

Hibben, 81 note, 82 note. 

Hobson, E. W., 184 note. 

Hodgson, S. H., 51 note, 219 
note. 

Hume, 14, 37, 85, 121, 123, 124, 
196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 
202 note. 

Huntington, E. V., 184 note. 

Huygens, 20. 

Huxley, 20. 

Infinite, the standing, 167 ; prag- 
matic definition of, 168; the 
growing, 170; must be treated 
as discontinuous, 172; ‘the new,’ 


23 4 


INDEX 


174, 175; is paradoxical, 176; 
is turned into problem by con- 
ceptual transformation of per- 
ceptual experience, 185, 

Infinity, 33; Kant’s definition of, 
160; ambiguity of his statement 
of problem of, 162; Renouvier’s 
solution of, 164. 

‘Insuperability of sensation,’ 79. 

Intellectualism, origin of, 83; in- 
adequacy of, 84; rule of, 222; 
self-contradictory, 225. 

James, W., 37 note, 50 note, 60 
note, 63 note, 96 note, 97 note, 
107 note. 111 note, 112 note, 118 
note, 135 note, 142 note, 219 note, 
228 note. 

Janet, P., 34 note. 

Jastrow, J., 18 note. 

Jerusalem, W., 207 note . 

Jevons, F. B., 18 note. 

Kant, 14, 31, 36, 37, 43 note, 51 
note, 84, 85, 124, 128, 159, 161 
note, 162, 163, 166, 170, 171, 
182, 184, 200, 201, 202. 

Kepler, 20. 

Keyser, J. C., 184 note. 

Knowledge, impossible on intel- 
lectualistic basis, 86. 

Laas, E., 54 note. 

Lange, T. A., 37. 

Laromiguiere, 50 note. 

Le Bon, G., 150 note. 

Leibnitz, 14, 36, 184, 195. 

LeRoy, 91 note. 

Lewes, G. H., 16 note, 19 note, 68 
note, 205 note. 

Liberatore, P. M., 119 note. 

Locke, 13, 37, 55 note, 121, 169, 


Lotze, 37, 86. 

Lovejoy, A. O., 18 note. 

MacDonald, D. B., 118 note. 

Mach, 90 note. 

Malebranche, 76 note. 

Mana, 17. 

Mansel, H. L., 50 note. 

Mariotte, 70. 

Marett, R. R., 18 note. 

Marvin, 149 note. 

Melioristic universe, the, 228. 

Metaphysical problems, exam- 
ples of, 27 ; nature of, 32. 

Metaphysics, defined, 31; ration- 
alism and empiricism in, 34. 

Michelet, 57 note. 

Milhaud, 91 note. 

Mill, 37, 107 note, 124 note, 192 
note, 203 note, 205 note, 209, 
214. 

Mill, James, 55 note, 102, 107 note. 

Miller, J. E., 63 note. 

Monism, vs. pluralism, 113 , mean- 
ing of, 115; kinds of, 116; mysti- 
cal, 116; of substance, 119; as 
absolute idealism, 137; defects 
of, 138; advantage of, 143; and 
novelty, 145. 

Motion, conceptually impossible, 
87. 

Mulford, Prentice, 18 note. 

Novelty, possibility of, 98 ; monisn i 
and pluralism and, 145; pro- 
blem of,147;perceptual,148; and 
science, 149; and personal expe- 
rience, 151; and conception, 
152; and the infinite, 153; fa- 
vored by Renouvier’s solution 
of problem of infinite, 164; 
problem of unaffected by new 


235 


INDEX 


definitions of infinite, 187; and 
causation, 189; negated by con- 
ceptual view of causation, 205; 
arises in perceptual experience 
of causation, 213. 

Number-continuum, the, 173. 

Objection, an, replied to, 109. 

Occasionalism, 194. 

‘ Omega,’ 177; its value, 178. 

Oneness, pragmatic analysis of, 
124;kindsof,12G; concatenated, 
129; value of absolute, 136. 

Ostwald, W., 71 note, 90 note, 150 
note. 

Paradoxes, Zeno’s, 157; Russell’s 
solution of, 180; criticism of 
Russell’s solution of, 181. 

Parmenides, 11, 41. 

Pascal, 20, 21. 

Paulsen, F., 15 note, 223. 

Pearson, 90 note, 203 note, 221. 

Peirce, C. S., 184 note. 

Percepts, distinguished from con- 
cept, 48; complexity of, 49; in- 
terpenetrate with concepts, 52; 
Bradley on, 92; consubstantial 
with concepts, 107. 

Personal identity, conceptually 
impossible, 87. 

Philosophers, attitude of, to dia- 
lectical difficulties, 91. 

Philosophy, defined, 4,5; its value, 
6; its enemies, 8; first objection 
to, 9;as man thinking, 15; ‘ posi- 
tive,’ 16; as sympathetic magic, 
17; and science, 21; as residuum 
of unanswered scientific pro- 
blems, 23; second objection to, 
24; third, 26; as metaphysics, 
27. 


Plato, 7, 11, 35, 36, 54 note, 76, 77. 

Plotinus, 118. 

Pluralism, vs. monism, 113; mean- 
ing of, 114, 140; defects of, 142; 
advantages of, 142; and novel- 
ty, 145. 

Plutarch, 77. 

Poincare, H., 91 note, 174 note, 
184 note. 

Porphyry, 118. 

Positivism, 203. 

Pragmatic Rule, the, 60; examples 
of application of, 62; used in 
critique of substance, 121. 

‘Principe du nombre,’ 164. 

‘Principle of Causality,’ the, 189, 
191. 

Principles, meaning of, 31. 

Probabilities, how acted on, 225. 

Protagoras, 34, 35. 

Pyrrho, 92 note. 

Pythagoras, 11, 156. 

Rationalists, contrasted with em- 
piricists, 35. 

Reality, 78; conceptual systems 
distinct realms of, 101. 

Regis, 197. 

Relations, multiplicity of, of real 
things, 89; unreality of appear- 
ance of, 89; of subject and predi- 
cate, unintelligible, 70. 

Renouvier, C., 163; solution of 
problem of infinite by, 164, 
165 note, 166, 172, 184, 186. 

Resemblance, an illusion, 88. 

Rickaby, J., 12, 119 note, 192 
note. 

Riehl, A., 205 note. 

Romanes, J. G., 50 note. 

Royce, 37, 72 note, 85, 137 note, 
141 note, 184 note, 221. 


236 


INDEX 


Russell, B., 174, 179, 180, 181, 
183, 186 note. 

Ruyssen, Th., 50 note. 

‘ Same,’ meaning of, 103. 

Santayana, G., 54 note. 

Sceptics, pyrrhonian, 91. 

Schiller, F. C. S., 37, 109 note. 

Schopenhauer, 26; on the origin 
of the problem of being, 38, 50 
note. 

Science, history of, 20; as special- 
ized philosophy, 21; and nov- 
elty, 149. 

Self-sameness of ideal objects, 102. 

Sigwart, C., 205 note. 

Silberstein, S. J., 120 note. 

Socrates, 37. 

Spencer, Herbert, 13, 27, 33, 42, 
65 note. 

Spinoza, 36, 42, 120 note, 121, 
136, 137 note. 

Stallo, J. B., 90 note. 

Stevenson, 39. 

Stewart, Prof. A. J., 55 note. 

Stockl, A., 119 note. 

Stout. G. F., 219 note. 

Suarez, 12. 

Substance, monism of, 119; cri- 
tique of, 121. 


Sympathetic magic, the primitive 
philosophy, 17. 

Taine, H., 59 note. 

Tannery, Paul, 157 note. 

Taylor, A. E., 101 note, 223. 

Thales, 11. 

Thomson, J. C., 117 note. 

Torricelli, 20. 

‘Transfinite numbers,’ 177. 

Unity, by concatenation, 129; of 
purpose, 131; of origin, 132; 
cash value of, 133; value of, 
136 

Values, of philosophy, 6; new, 
brought by concepts, 71. 

Voltaire, 20, 26. 

Wallace, W., 57 note, 75 note. 

Ward, J., 24 note, 219 note. 

Waterton, S., 184 note. 

Whewell, W., 19. 

Wilbois, 91 note. 

Wolff, C., 14, 31. 

Zeno, 41, 88, 156, 157, 158, 159, 
170, 179, 186 note. 


@be BiUcrsibe prestf 

CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS 


U . S . A 





c uuc 





Ju\ - 



c 

- J h 






Duke University Libraries 



D00482229 


TOANS/FRQMPL 

.1963 


1 . '-Am 


- 05,135 


191.9 


J29S 



